JFK, the Mob and the CIA (1988)

and our subject on this edition of the whitney report is the assassination of president kennedy a crime that changed our lives polls show that most americans think the killers got away but our government which still pursues world war ii crimes isn't pursuing this crime the compelling evidence has been lost in confusion confusion reigned in dallas on november 22 1963 clearly shown by this montage of films and panicked radio reports and in the 25 years since then the confusion hasn't dimmed conspiracy theorists have taken aim at the warren commission findings from every direction so far none of the theorists has been able to sell the public on any single solution contrary to the official one that lee harvey oswald was a lone left wing nut who killed kennedy without help and that jack ruby was another lone nut who killed oswald spontaneously and out of sympathy with the kennedy family so far arguments with the warren commission have focused on evidence that we here like most of you have found hopelessly inconclusive for example slow motion films and electronically enhanced sound tapes some people say they proved there was a second gunman and other people say they don't diagrams of bullet trajectories pictures of entry and exit wounds test firings of oswald's gun some experts say this proves oswald fired all the shots while other experts with just as many phds say the same evidence proves that oswald couldn't possibly have fired the shots so let's forget all this also set aside for the moment the matter of kennedy's sex life and his efforts to assassinate fidel castro both matters it now seems clear did prompt a cover-up of certain facts after the assassination but in solving the murder they are red herrings they only add to the confusion adding further to the confusion many well-known conspiracy theorists have blown the word of an occasional contrary witness all out of proportion every trial lawyer knows that witnesses to big sudden events will honestly differ over what happened we have satisfied ourselves that there is overwhelming evidence that oswald did shoot both president kennedy and dallas police officer j.d tippett and that the occasional contrary evidence is no more than exists in any big case but that's where the warren commission stopped we think it's just the beginning many people have been linked to the assassination by various conspiracy theorists but we know for certain that two people did commit crimes in dallas that weekend lee oswald and jack ruby if one could show a unifying link between the two surely that link would have become the focus of the investigation the warren commission pictured them as lone wolves because for reasons we'll explain later the fbi never told the warren commission the pertinent facts but the link between oswald and ruby did exist and his name was carlos marcello carlos marcelo is the boss the couple the mafia structure which centers in the metropolitan new orleans area and extends into adjoining states he was very powerful in the gambling business but that is not to say that he wasn't in the narcotics business too and he was he imported heroin he distributed heroin his tentacles in gambling particularly reached all the way to dallas and houston jack ruby ran a striptease bar in dallas but where the warren commission would have you believe that's all ruby did fbi reports show that ruby was an important figure in gambling narcotics and other rackets ruby was described in one fbi document of the late 50s as being heading up a major narcotics operation that ran in texas the east and even into mexico this is david e shine an mit trained mathematician whose fascination with the kennedy case led him to spend 15 years sifting through tens of thousands of pages of raw data much of it obtained through the freedom of information act we find he has ties to top mafia people around the country joseph savillo the mafia boss of dallas an fbi document describes that ruby is a frequent visitor and associate of cevillo just how close was ruby tied to savillo's boss carlos marcello this is joseph nellis washington lawyer and former counsel to the key falver committee the first big national investigation into organized crime [Music] could somebody have operated in the fields of gambling and narcotics in dallas in the early 1960s without uh carlos marcello saying that's okay not possible jonathan not without getting a bullet in your head that's what would have happened to somebody absolutely you had to get permission to operate permission to kill somebody permission to break a leg permission to do anything jack ruby visited carlos marcello's brother and under boss in new orleans just months before the assassination but ruby wasn't under the marcelo's thumb alone it's critical to understand that ruby was also tied to the chicago mafia which gave jimmy hoffa his power ruby was born in chicago and entered the rackets there as a teenager and among the things he did according to fbi records he ran errands for the capone mob was paid one dollar for every sealed envelope that he was able to transport from one place to another by 1939 ruby was helping run a junk handlers union local ruby was a suspect in the murder of the locals president but records of the police investigation have disappeared ruby continued at the local under its new mafia connected boss paul red dorfman now you're talking about a very significant figure in the teamsters history red dorffman was a local chicagoan who handled all of the insurance placed by the teamsters pension fund and by their other fund activities in other words he was collecting premiums on millions upon millions of dollars well the dorfman's were long time associates of mr hoffa they certainly had very close links to organized crime in chicago and elsewhere and mr hoffa made arrangements that they received certain plum type insurance contracts dealing with the pension fund and what have you which were very lucrative there was a sweetheart arrangement between the dorfman agency and jimmy hoffa that did well for both of them i'm sure that i'm not exaggerating it one bit when i say that jimmy hoffa counted himself one of red dolphin's best friends but ruby's ties to hoffa were not just indirect through the dorfman's the shocker is that ruby knew hoffa himself author dan moldaya who was the first to publicly assert that the mafia killed kennedy was stunned some years ago when hoffa's son told him that jimmy hoffa had known ruby since 1939 the son james hoffa jr a respected detroit lawyer then tried to put the remark off the record so moldaya confirmed it by tape recording a phone conversation between them and so i turn on the tape recorder and on tape hoffa admitted it again that his dad was a friend of uh that his friend was a jack ruby you told me that uh your father knew jack ruby but you know as i remember you said so what uh 1939 he was the kind of guy everyone knew 1939 well that's when he knew back when he was working with dorfman ruby's work for the teamsters in the chicago mafia continued and naturally came to the attention of the kefalver investigation in 1950. remember the warren commission painted ruby as just a local punk we're not interested in local crime or in statewide crime it had to have an interstate aspect in order for federal jurisdiction to be appropriate and ruby's name cropped up in a number of hijackings some of which were minor and some of which were some of which were rather major but he was a member of a group that had ties in detroit and in cleveland ohio and to some extent in florida so among the others that we grabbed in that dragnet his name came up and we interrogated him as a matter of fact very briefly to establish the interstate connection not dreaming of course who he would become or what he would become nellis discussed other businesses ruby was in such as distributing items to bars and stores i asked if that was a mob controlled racket well if ruby had it it was because i'm sure as i sit here that he never did a thing around chicago without approval from somebody higher up the chicago mob's biggest racket in the 50s and 60s was jimmy hoffa and the teamsters it would be hard to overstate the evil they represented hoffa controlled the union's multi-billion dollar worker pension funds borrowing money from the funds and not paying it back was a big source of mob income the amounts of the loans were in the hundreds of millions of dollars but the tracing of the so-called kickbacks from those loans to mr hoffman's co-defendants i would say would be termed in the millions i asked joe nellis about hoffa's and the dorfman's use of violence well jonathan let me say this violence and enforcement uh were part and parcel of the operations of the teamsters with their connections to organized crime beginning long before the kefir investigation murder certainly was a major weapon especially where there was a close daily tie between the local and the local teamsters union and the local gangs senator john f kennedy joined the senate's second big organized crime investigation the mcclellan committee in 1957 his brother robert became chief counsel they were revolted by the violence and corruption they saw in the nation's largest union and the kennedy singled out hofa as a target while leaving the hearings after these people had testified regarding this matter did you say that to anyone did you make that statement after these people testify before the committee i never talked to either one of them supposedly i'm not talking about it to them did you make that statement you hear in the hearing room after the testimony was finished not concerning them far as i know but who did you make it about you know and they've been discussing somebody in the figure of speech well who did you make the thing and who's back who's back were you going to break it thank you speech i don't even know what i was talking about i don't know what you're talking about this was hardball against organized crime bob kennedy and john kennedy hated the mafia all out of proportion and the mafia hated them right back did hoffa ever become an obsession for bobby kennedy i think it goes all the way i think the answer is yes but i think it goes all the way back to mr kennedy's dealings with the mcclellan committee when he was on the mcclellan committee and they investigated the teamsters and mr hoffa and i think he felt that this was a man that had violated state and federal law with impunity and that no local prosecutor was big enough to really take on mr hoffman i might say that in connection with the investigation a great deal of evidence was developed indicating uh violent beatings and uh terrorism in connection with those who had opposed uh the international president of the team's abuse there was a testimony developed eventually in connection with the threats against me and against my family jack ruby meanwhile had moved to dallas one of carlos marcelo's towns he later said he was on assignment from the chicago mafia which had close and friendly relations with marcelo he said that he was told to go down there indicating that the underworld connections in chicago had led him to to go to dallas to go into the nightclub business there the sheriff of dallas at the time sheriff guthrie testifies that ruby came down to dallas with about 20 thugs and hoodlums in the city this was at the time when the mob came down to take over the dallas rockets what relations did the chicago mob have with dallas with carlos marcello and excellent oh now you're talking about one of the key facets of the keep over investigation one of the chief focus of our investigation was to determine the interconnection with one gang and another it turns out the chicago mob above all i'm talking about timoney ricardo sam giancana and before him al capone were the most active in arrangements with other mobs in other cities ruby soon became involved in the cuban gambling and vice operations of marcelo's friend florida mafia boss santos trafficante according to records and corroborated testimony when a triumphant fidel castro jailed trophachonde and others in 1959 ruby offered twenty five thousand dollars to an arms supplier of castros for help springing the prisoners ruby dashed to cuba twice his fare paid by a gambling operative of trophicantis four days after the kennedy assassination the c i a learned from a reliable witness that ruby had personally visited traffic conte a ranking mafia godfather in his cuban jail clearly ruby's ties to the mafia weren't just marginal as the warren commission suggested he was exactly the sort of person to be assigned an important and risky mission and he was not the sort of person who would have suddenly shot oswald in sorrow for the kennedys but one even more shocking fact was completely ignored by the warren commission lee oswald the one other person we know was plotting murder in dallas that weekend also was connected to the carlos marcelo mafia organization oswald's uncle dutch murray who brought oswald up as a father oswald's own father having died in infancy uh worked in the marcelo organization he was a bookmaker and according to reports knew marcelo personally oswald was quite close to this marcelo affiliated uncle during 1963 saw him many times oswald was associated in various degrees with at least six members of the marcelo organization with david ferry who worked for marcelo's lawyer for guy bannister and private investigator who did work for marcelo who knew oswald a new ferry and ferry was working just about on a daily basis for carlos marcelo in the fall of 63. he was working on a criminal case that marcelo was involved in unquestionably the marcelo criminal organization was well aware of the existence of lee harvey oswald in new orleans in the spring and summer of 1963. oswald operated a highly suspicious one-man pro-castro organization in a small office building occupied by other men who were all outspokenly anti-castro two of those men pilot david ferry and former fbi agent guy bannister worked for carlos marcello who despised castro oswald had previously known fairy as leader of an air cadet group oswald had joined in high school oswald unlike jack ruby was not a career mobster he was a kid who had already compiled a record that could be viewed as cookie having shot himself once to avoid an unwanted transfer in the marine corps and slashed his wrists to avoid deportation from the soviet union where he had defected adding now to this kooky image by handing out pro castro leaflets he was the perfect actor for the role of patsy in an occasionally used mafia murder scenario ron goldstock one of america's most successful mob prosecutors compares it to the way new york mafia boss joe columbo was shot at a televised public rally a few years after the kennedy assassination the killing of colombo was done in such a ways that the killer himself was immediately assassinated and the person who assassinated the killer then got away and the killer of colombo was not a mafia guy he he was a criminal that's right he was a he was a fringe person somebody who they might be able to dupe into the actual killing whether he knew what he was doing and why or not the same thing may be true of oswald further diverting investigators from the marcelo connection were oswald's brushes with us intelligence in the marines as a radar operator at a base for top secret u2 spy flights over the soviet union he worked around cia people which made it even more suspicious that he learned russian and defected to the ussr his way in and out of russia was surprisingly well greased suggesting possible participation in one of many u.s spy programs of the time described by former c i a officer victor marchetti everything suggests that he was involved in some sort of an intelligence program probably sent over as bait in the hopes that he could either penetrate or be picked up by the uh by the kgb and uh doubled well but of course not really being doubled on his return home oswald was close to at least one person who had been involved in us intelligence operations all prompting suggestions that the c i a killed president kennedy even though there's no evidence of it and no one suggested that jack ruby was cia to create a motive for the cia history has been revised to say that kennedy was going to pull out of vietnam and make peace with castro in fact however the very month president kennedy was killed he had ordered a coup in vietnam that only deepened american involvement there and records show that literally to the day of the assassination the kennedys continued to encourage plots to assassinate castro and sabotage the cuban economy the cia lacked a motive nor would castro or khrushchev likely have risked world war three to make lyndon johnson president though accusations have been made congressional investigators expressly exonerated castro in the assassination only one group had anything big to gain by replacing kennedy and it had everything to gain there are a number of different areas where action is needed i think that in the field of organized crime i think it's a very serious situation facing the country at the present time bobby kennedy went here joined the justice department revitalized the organized crime and racketeering section he had been counsel to the mcclellan committee on which jack kennedy had sat as a senator he recognized the danger of organized crime in this country and he was really the first attorney general to do so in a vigorous way he brought together some of the best and the brightest people to work in that justice department he had the fbi working with lawyers going out different parts of the country conducting investigations prosecutions and they were beginning to make a difference bobby kennedy demonstrating his relentlessness developed a source within the underworld a person who later turned stage evidence that was joe valachi and joe velacci went public and i think the fall in 1963 testifying about who killed who who did what to whom and he was a soldier he was an actual maid member a soldier within the within the veto genovese family and was responsible for putting a lot of people in jail bobby king is probably the best crime fighter this country's ever had he was the roughest on organized crime and as attorney general he was eating mob guys for breakfast under president johnson and defense oriented attorney general ramsey clark the war on the mafia predictably cooled off beyond the benefits reaped by the mafia in general on kennedy's death two men in particular had faced ruin if the kennedys had stayed in office carlos marcelo and jimmy hoffa during the time of the bay of pigs invasion bobby kennedy had authorized the literal kidnapping of marcelo off a new orleans street put him on a private plane at the airport and and sent him to guatemala robert kennedy went on record and saying i want to be remembered as the guy who broke the mafia in particular he was incensed he was enraged over marcelo's defiance of his deportation marcelo had re-entered the country illegally surreptitiously about two months after bobby kennedy had deported the kennedys kept after marcelo who was on trial the very day the shots were fired that removed kennedy from office saving marcelo's career hoffa faced the same problem in his case the charges ultimately cost him his career but in 1963 ridding himself of his obsessed prosecutor may well have seemed his only way out and he said as much to grady parton a louisiana teamster leader who later turned government witness against hoffa parton told me that he had that hoffa became outraged with bobby kennedy he's going to fire obama's house he's going to hit his house with plastic explosives at hickory hill virginia burn the house down killed bob kennedy kill ethel kennedy killed the entire family and ed parton said listen jim if you're going to kill bob kennedy go ahead kill bob kennedy but don't kill his family and uh and hoffa replied no it the hell with them their candies i want them all dead hoffa and marcela were particularly close to each other the inter-involvement of hoffa and marcelo was a very close one for one thing when jimmy hoffa was on trial in tennessee and during one of the recesses jimmy hoffa came up to the assistant district attorney asked about his friend carlos marcelo and then asked the assistant district attorney to be sure to to remind carlos marcel that he had asked for him there are numerous actions of ruby marcelo and marcelo's agents in the months before the assassination even in the days before that suggest their involvement in a criminal conspiracy the record shows that ruby made a visit to new orleans saw frank karachi who was lieutenant to carlos marcelo he made a phone call to nafio pacora another marcelo lieutenant convicted of a drug offense pcora called ruby back his phone records show calls to people like barney baker top teamster thug during the weeks and months and days and actually hours before the president's murder ruby received numerous telephone calls from some very interesting people some people who are very very close to jimmy hoff including murray w miller the number two man in the teamsters union behind hoffa barney baker hoffa's number one leg breaker out of chicago three telephone calls to and from baker these are only part of ruby's calls and visits as revealed by telephone company and hotel records he met pete marcelo carlos's brother and colleague at the new orleans bar that served as pete marcelo's headquarters and the weekend of the assassination david ferry marcelo's personal aide and oswald's friend made a highly suspicious trip to texas and driving through a storm-swept night to houston on what he said was a hunting trip instead witnesses say he spent almost his entire time making and receiving calls from pay booths in houston he lied about it to the fbi which learned among other things that he had neglected to take a gun on the hunting trip ferry was actually arrested in connection with the kennedy assassination the following monday but the charges were dropped and he died suddenly and suspiciously just as another investigation was getting underway ruby also spent the weekend suspiciously viewing the assassination from atop the plaza where it occurred following the president to the hospital and then stalking oswald and talking with a stripper karen carlin whose sudden need for twenty 25 dollars sunday morning was the cover story for ruby's visit to the western union office across from the police station where he shot oswald supposedly on the spur of the moment ruby supposedly received a teleco telephone call from karen carlin at 10 19 sunday morning an hour before he kills ozzie right in which she asked to borrow 25 dollars and but he lives down the road right it's not it's not a big distance and ruby the story is ruby then left uh drove down and sent the telegram and four minutes later happened to saunter down to the police building and shoot oswald this is david bellen former counsel to the warren commission bellen argues that ruby's shot at oswald couldn't have been premeditated precisely because of the karen karlin alibi that ruby was home getting her phone call when oswald was scheduled for transfer the reason that ruby had an opportunity to kill oswald ruby happened to be downtown by happenstance on sunday morning to wire some money to one of his employees his restaurant had been closed ruby was in the western union office the time stamp was 11 17. oswald was killed at about 11 21 ruby walked down a ramp leading to the basement where press people were waiting for oswald to be transferred from the dallas police jail to the county jail a postal inspector by the name of holmes decided instead of going to church that morning to stop in and help his friend captain will fritz at the interrogation sessions of oswald fritz was interrogating oswald along with representatives of the secret service and the fbi and fritz invited holmes into those interrogation sessions if holmes would have just gone on a church that morning he would not have added a half hour or more to the interrogation of oswald and oswald would have been transferred long before ruby ever got downtown the fact is that ruby was not in his apartment during the time of the call three journalists and a policeman saw ruby pacing and back and forth in front of that police building from eight o'clock that morning a cleaning woman who called ruby that sunday morning got a man she didn't recognize his voice he had no no knowledge of her or their weekly cleaning arrangement when karen carlin was first questioned by the secret service about the assassination as the agent reported she was terrified she was so terrified she could barely speak when she finally spoke as we see in the secret service report she said she believed there was a conspiracy by oswald ruby and others to kill president kennedy and that if she talked that she would be killed a few months after the assassination karen carlin was shot to death in a hotel room there are other eyewitness accounts pointing to a conspiracy of course unreliable witnesses often pop up in highly publicized cases but these accounts all came at or before the assassination and concern marcelo one is from ed becker a las vegas promoter who had been seeking marcelo's help on a deal and visited the godfather's vast mississippi delta hideaway now i have to be honest i i knew who i was talking to and i think because i was from las vegas he was probably more free with me than he would have been if i was from washington dc and and so i started to needle it about being deported not in a you know not in a way but in the sort of a genius it was sure bad you know though bobby did you know that after that and he picked that up and that's what happened he started he started talking about uh there are ways in taking care of these things you know and i'm like now i'm interested and i'm going to prompt him you know what do you mean you're gonna you're gonna kill him you know bobby he said no you don't do that he says uh you cut off the uh the head the tail dies and that you know what does that mean to me you know and then later on he's saying you know this guy's like a a rock in your shoe you know you limp long enough you're going to do something about it well you know as i say we're drinking listening to the music and having a very good time and then i i realized he's very serious i mean he's he's not kidding with me i've really upset him by even asking these questions and this is rattling around his head and he's this is the kind of stuff he's giving me becker reported this incident to the fbi long before the assassination and before the stone out of the shoe phrase became popularly known as mafia hit talk a cuban jose aleman has testified to a similar story about marcelo's friend trafficante and marcelo biographer john davis uncovered fbi files showing that a georgia mayor and businessman eugene sumner actually reported seeing oswald take a lot of bills from a marcelo underboss at the restaurant marcelo uses as a headquarters in new orleans the story is all the more believable because sumner in new orleans for a business trip apparently didn't know that the restaurant where he was having dinner and the manager he saw hand over the money were connected to the mafia only three days after the assassination he went straight to the fbi one actually went to a police officer first then the fbi and told the whole story they then sent him photographs of lee harvey oswald and he verified that that was the man he saw in marcelo's headquarters the fbi never followed up the sumner report and sumner refuses to discuss it now and there is still more evidence that requires us to think in terms of a conspiracy compelling evidence that a fake oswald was busy creating a phony image for the real oswald as a left-wing nut the warren commission used the left-wing nut image in concluding oswald was the lone assassin it's cited among other things a trip oswald made to mexico city two months before the assassination in which he made himself highly visible at the cuban and soviet embassies an investigator for the house assassinations committee edwin lopez pried loose the cia's photographic records of everyone who entered or left the cuban embassy in mexico city matching the strips of negatives against time logs on all three cameras at the embassy he found no oswald i'm a lawyer i'd like to see evidence and the evidence that we had was that there was no photograph and if we had no photograph there and we had the negatives so that they had not been it wasn't like someone had caught up and said between this time december in twice we inserted them and we taped them etc i mean we had the photos there the scripts of the scripts of negatives um we had one whole strip that was eliminated there could have been but everyone that we spoke to in mexico city and outside told us there were only three cameras and we had the scripts for all cameras but the most persuasive evidence of a false oswald comes from j edgar hoover himself through the efforts of marcelo biographer john davis we have obtained this astounding secret memo hoover wrote to the head of the secret service a memo never shown to the warren commission the key paragraph says the fbi itself concluded that the visitor to the soviet embassy identifying himself as lee harvey oswald was not in fact lee harvey oswald two oswalds mean one thing a conspiracy but hoover never told the warren commission it took until the late 1970s for the house assassinations committee to begin to discover the mafia links to the jfk assassination the house committee's last report suggested a mafia plot but was carefully hedged and ultimately collapsed in a dispute over acoustical testing but the committee pointed the way for new discoveries by shime davis and others why didn't the warren commission report the relationships and activities that indicate a mafia conspiracy because the people the commission was counting on to give it the facts fbi chief j edgar hoover and cia chief alan dulles not to mention attorney general robert kennedy himself all had to cover up the facts all three men knew that the kennedys had approved castro assassination plots and were determined to keep that secret they also knew that the plots had involved mafia elements close to marcelo a thorough investigation might turn this up cia chief and warren commission member alan dulles not only had the castro secrets to protect he may also have known that his agency used oswald to spy on the ussr it would have meant big trouble for either the spying itself or the link with oswald to become known hoover who controlled most of the commission's information flow had still other motives hoofer basically he never thought that the mafia existed in this country as a consequence the fbi which was more interested in the red scare and the witch hunts and the kami bashing they were very much a part of the movement to move the attention away from the key fob for committee and organize crimes and syndicate crime and to move it into the witch hunts of the house america un-american activities committee and the joe mccarthy hearings of the early 1950s robert kennedy time and again chewed out j edgar hoover for not getting the information on carlos marcello and his organization that he wanted okay so if allegations come in linking carlos to the assassination that was the last thing jagged hoover ever wanted to hear if it could have been shown that carlos martial or members of his organization were involved in the assassination it would have totally destroyed his reputation for everyone including president johnson who wanted to get the country past the affair as soon as possible the lone nut theory was convenient nicholas katzenbach running justice in robert kennedy's absence signed off on that conclusion literally before the president had been buried alan dulles promoted that idea at the warren commission's first meeting yet 25 years later aaron cohn one of the nation's most respected lawmen says this regarding carlos marcelo and the kennedy assassination one of the toughest things to do in our society is to make people recognize that the old idea about anyone alleging guilt by association has to be waived when you start talking about the conspiracies of organized crime because organized crime is crime by association that i believe that there was an adequate basis in the official findings to to justify an ultimate indictment by a grand jury since i believe that there were the necessary ingredients of a conspiracy two or two or more people involved and at least one overt act there is no statute of limitations on homicide godfather marcelo is now 78 years old i remain skeptical that the criminal test of beyond a reasonable doubt could be met so long afterwards but it does seem that the preponderance of the evidence the standard for civil court juries indicates a mafia conspiracy to kill president kennedy two of our guests here in the studio agree with aaron cohn that a grand jury should meet and indict they are john davis author of the new marcelo biography mafia kingfish and david shine author of contract on america and we are joined by david bellen counsel to the warren commission whose new book is final disclosure the full truth about the assassination of president kennedy which also contains startling new information about kennedy's foreign policy and in washington senator arlen specter another former warren commission counsel senator have you written the book no no i haven't written any book i'm just here um gratis that's terrific okay david bellen and senator spector let's start with you david dillon i saw you taking notes during the tape you just saw well i took notes because i was so disappointed that a person as sophisticated as you uh mr quitney has a fallen hook line and sinker for the central thesis of books of fiction such as the mafia conspiracy books that the mafia was involved in the assassination of president kennedy whenever you have claims of conspiracy you have to go to the central thesis of the claim and you have to apply two things first is you have to take a look at the heart of the evidence and the second thing you have to do is apply some common sense now the practical claims that the mafia conspiracists make are that jack ruby was conspiratorially involved because jack ruby killed oswald and he was therefore some kind of a hit man from the mafia you first start with a question of common sense mafia hitmen do not go ahead and kill their targets when they're surrounded by the police when they're sure to be apprehended and incarcerated in a jail and face life imprisonment or possible death what about the colombia apart from apart from that practical situation you have the happenstance of jack ruby being downtown in dallas at the time that he shot lee harvey oswald there is another reason that ruby was not conspiratorially involved and this is something that senator spector may want to comment on but against the advice of ruby's own attorneys ruby demanded that he take a lie detector test of so-called lie detector test polygraph examination and in fact did take that examination and in fact according to the expert who who was questioning jack ruby ruby truthfully answered all questions concerning the assassination of the possibilities of conspiracy uh including questions that was were asked was he conspiratorially involved no why did he shoot lee harvey oswald to save mrs kennedy the ordeal of coming back to dallas to have to testify in a trial and the very fact that ruby would ask to take a polygraph exam is independent evidence of his innocence of conspiracy another practical aspect which has never been discussed in mr scheim's book or by the house assassination committee was that rabbi hillel silverman who was ruby's rabbi who intimately uh knew ruby visited with him in his cell in dallas several times a week until the time in the following july when when rabbi silverman left alice to accept another pulpit rabbi silverman was absolutely convinced of the innocence of ruby so far as any conspiracy is concerned now it is true that there are some witnesses as you indicated in the earlier uh film introduction to this discussion which to be candid i thought was really uh not fairly presented because it just presented one side of the story without the other uh but it is well i trust that senator specter and i will therefore have the primary amount of time in this oral discussion uh but it's true uh as you pointed out that when and trial lawyers know that whenever you have witnesses to an accident to any sudden event you're going to get different stories and it's true that there are some people that claim that they saw jack ruby in and around the police station earlier that morning the fact is that if jack ruby were going to go ahead and stay around there to make sure that he was going to get oswald he would not have left the police station to go and send the wire in the western union office because in no event would someone know exactly when oswald was coming down let me tell you the police lieutenant rebel had so many witnesses who placed ruby wandering around the police station that he said he didn't even need russian's testimony and the whole crux of the issue with whether ruby was convicted on first-degree murder was that his alibi was false it was a premeditated murder this is what the jubilee the jury found may i supplement that last remark of mr shimesh briefly but then i want senator specker the the police officer in charge of basement security patrick dean was so close to the marcelo organization that when marcelo's deputy in dallas came back from the appalachian crimes enclaves the first thing he did was to have dinner with patrick dean with them with sergeant patrick dean so you're suggesting a man like dean might have been willing to fall senator specter what do you remember of ruby's testimony and what do you make of whether he could have been downtown on sunday morning waiting to shoot oswald what i recall of ruby's testimony was that he flatly said he was not involved in a conspiracy and that he passed a lie detector test when we deal with the question of whether ruby broadly hinted at a conspiracy i saw that comment made in mr shine's at page three and i went back and checked the transcript carefully and it simply isn't so it was taken out of context the investigations which have been conducted on the assassination of president kennedy and there have been many many simply do not support any theory of a conspiracy or any proposition that the mafia was involved in an assassination when you asked me earlier if i had written a book i said no i have written no book for profit but what i might have pointed out was that i participated in writing one book it's called the warrant commission report which has been read by virtually no one and in this book from pages 243 to 423 there is a detailed analysis of the investigation of possible conspiracy and the conclusion was no evidence of a conspiracy my reading of the the report was that ruby's lie detector test was inconclusive but i want to ask you if you were aware at the time of the commission that there had been that j edgar hoover himself and concluded that a an imposter had identified himself as lee harvey oswald six or eight weeks before the assassination at the soviet embassy and if you had been aware that the cia photographs of everyone entering the cuban embassy showed that the person identifying himself as lee oswald and raising somewhat of a ruckus when they turned him down as a visa was an imposter wouldn't that have indicated a conspiracy and would that have changed any of your investigation well i did not know of that specific issue or allegations doesn't that show that there was a conspiracy uh no not necessarily and i think that there had been uh materials kept from the commission but i would point to mr davis's prologue in response to this question as to what the commission did and how much we relied on hoover we conducted an independent investigation and this got investigation was conducted by people outside of government went to the chief justice of the united states to john mccloy and to others of independence and went all around the country to find young lawyers who had no association with the government uh david i should say younger lawyers david bellen of uh des moines arlen specter in philadelphia from chicago from los angeles and mr davis in his introduction says that the commission was a collective one of cowardice ignorance self-deception and naive acceptance of the gospel according to hoover and the fact is we weren't we conducted an independent investigation and we differed in many respects from what the fbi had concluded and i think we found the real facts and certainly no one in the intervening 25 years has disproved our basic conclusions could i respond to them sure yes what i was driving at in that introduction to mr shine's book in which i go into it at considerable length in my own book is that the warren commission simply did not receive adequate information suggesting the possibility of a conspiracy involving organized crime and i can give you some examples we have already mentioned that david ferry an associate of oswald and also of carlos martillo was arrested two days after the assassination the fbi conducted a very thorough investigation of david ferry and they found very very many uh suspicious things about him the information on ferry and the reports the fbi reports on ferry never even arrived at the warren commission you didn't even see them i also uncovered documents suggesting the possible involvement of the marcelo organization in the assassination which never these came into the fb these allegations came to the fbi about three four days after the assassination they never got to the warren commission we could go on there were uh as we know they were very very um unsavory plots on the part of the cia in alliance with the mafia to assassinate fidel castro which robert kennedy as attorney general knew about which the director of the fbi and jack hoover knew about which alan dulles has sat on the warren commission knew about these were never given to the commission the commission knew nothing about them they were never informed senator were you aware of lee oswald's ties to the same criminal organization in new orleans uh that jack ruby was tied to were you aware of the mafia assassination plot the answer is no i was not but let me hasten to add that that was not my area of responsibility i have not had an opportunity to read mr davis book although i tried to do so before this program i hardly read mr shine's book but what i have seen in uh the cuts which you sent me and in mr schein's book and i think in mr davis's book but i can't be sure because i haven't read it are snatches of a little fact here and there which really add up to nothing all the materials that i know about in detail as to the trajectory of the bullets the direction of the shots mr shine is simply categorically wrong that's what senator spector just said he said that david shine is so wrong uh his credibility [Music] is so subject to question on these basic facts that therefore when he's so wrong on these basic facts you have to assume that he's also wrong on putting together little bits and snatches i i have to respond i've been attacked by two by two people let me say first of all the senate intelligence committee reviewed the warren commission's performance in 1976 the committee found from memos from hoover and johnson that there was predetermined instructions that oswald was the lone assassin uh bert griffin was the staff member in charge of jack ruby he was not allowed to go to jack ruby's testimony griffin stated i feel betrayed evidence was withheld from me jack ruby gave a canned alibi ruby asked for the polygraph test to get another chance for contact with federal officials one final thing just that you neglect to mention is as new newsweek disclosed ruby wrote a note from his jail cell stating to his lawyer joe donahoe joe you should know this uh my other lawyer tom howard told me to make up the story that i shot oswald so that mrs kennedy wouldn't go to trial his rubies alive is obviously preposterous given his background over a hundred witnesses saying that he had close mob ties and a significant mob position the whole thing is preposterous mr shame do you think that we have we are going to respond we are not going to settle ruby's story by picking a piece here and a piece there the only way people will understand it is if they go to the transcript it took about two hours i was present for part of it if they go to the lie detector test and if they read that i was present for all of that and they will see in a total context i believe that jack ruby was telling the truth that he was not involved in a conspiracy with lee harvey oswald when we have a piece picked here and a piece picked there and a piece picked somewhere else and it is simply not possible for me to know all those details for for many reasons it was outside of my narrow scope some things were not given to the warren commission but when you take a look at all of them on the extracts that i saw before this program started they simply don't amount to anything you say mr whitney that they would establish beyond the preponderance of the evidence well i flatly disagree with you uh senator doesn't the existence of an oswald imposter indicate that someone else was conspiring for what he did well i do not know the details of the allegation as to an oswald imposter but i do know that the warren commission turned over every stone and found no conspiracy did you investigate what david ferry was doing on the weekend he said he was going hunting but in fact took no gun and witnesses said he was making phone calls and receiving them from payback i did not because that was not my area of responsibility but there were other competent investigators who did and since that time that ground has been reviewed by many many many investigators including the house committee and all have found no evidence of a conspiracy except for the acoustical evidence which has since been totally discredited by the national academy of science well the chief counsel of the house committee said there was much other evidence of conspiracy and in fact wrote a lengthy book about it well that's the chief counsel the house committee aside from the acoustical evidence which was discredited the house committee found no evidence of a conspiracy did the commission investigate the conversations that oswald had with uh that excuse me that jack ruby had with high-ranking teamster and mafia people in the days and weeks before the assassination and his his own ties with jimmy hoffa and the teamsters well i do not know the answer to that question again because it was not my specific area of responsibility but competent investigators went over every stone that there was available to us at the time does it bother you that hoover reached conclusions about an oswald imposter and didn't tell the commission yes it does bother me if that in fact happened as i sit here i do not know if that happened but we were concerned about what mr hoover was doing we were concerned about what the cia was doing and i believe that even though we did not get the information we should have in some particulars that we found the correct conclusion senator there are fbi reports of the investigation of david ferry which j edgar hoover withheld from you and your fellow commissioners and staff members of the warren commission one report indicated that david ferry a friend of lee harvey oswald met with the boss of the louisiana mafia the two weekends preceding the assassination uh since the boss of the louisiana mafia was a sworn enemy of the kennedys since robert kennedy had sworn to destroy his power it should have been significant that a friend of oswald was meeting with an associate of this mafia boss it was so significant i believe that j hoover did not want you to see it and he withheld it i have the document it was never sent to the warren commission it is not among the commission documents in in the archives it was withheld well mr davis wasn't that made available to the house committee it was and it made the house committee very suspicious well as a matter of fact the house committee that's the point it may have made the house committee very suspicious but the house committee did not conclude that the mafia was involved in a conspiracy to kill president kennedy very close to anything that arlen specter said i came to the uh warren commission as an independent young lawyer for des moines iowa beholden to no one and trials i had always advocated one side or another but here i was in washington advocating nothing but the truth and like ireland and the other members of the staff leaving no stone unturned to find the truth and if you can put yourselves in our in our shoes uh sure we have preliminary reports of the fbi and there are literally hundreds of fbi interviews and i might add by the way many fbi reports were inaccurate if you want to go ahead and build a case on a chief of inaccurate fbi reports uh there are literally hundreds of them the fbi just sometimes is not accurate when it records information the senate intelligence committee found that the war that the fbi and lied to the warren commission the house select committee regardless of what mr specter infers their motives concluded the murder of president kennedy was probably a conspiracy that the mafia had the motive means an opportunity to kill him let me quote exactly what that house committee basically said because i can tell you before you read from your book final disclosure let me note that you express outrage in your own book at alan dulles a member of the warren commission not disclosing the uh mafia assassination plots that uh he he uh was aware of he made against castro yeah i mean the cia assassination plots and i also disclose in my book that i was the one that basically uncovered that and brought it to the attention of the rockefeller commission and just as i left no stone to return and by work with the warrant commission i left no stone unturned uh in my work with the rockefeller commission investigating the cia were those plots with help from the warren commission there is no exception by the head of the ex-head of the cia and by the head of the fbi why were they withheld from you they must have been relevant you have just heard a lot of information there's enough evidence that the documentary segment alone could have run two hours at the start of the studio discussion we said we'd keep taping until all the guests decided that they had said their piece and we did we've combed the transcript and the fair statement of every point raised in opposition to our documentary was included in the edited version you just saw my thanks to all our guests on this program i'm jonathan whitney and i hope to see you next time on the whitney report

Channel: MOBFAX

Views: 418,621

Keywords: JFK, mafia, CosaNostra, CarlosMarcello, JackRuby, Oswald, Loneguntheory, CIA, FidelCastro, Organizedcrime, news

Id: rrp4lNLQ1iw

Length: 57min 25sec (3445 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 16 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/daddiop1mpio]

A good watch. Thank you