Free Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History by Jim Keith

was assassinated, his principal reputation was that of a talented con-artist.
     
    I shrugged. That wasn’t much to go on.
     
    Soon there was enough information in the news about assassination plots involving organized crime to draw my attention in that direction. In February of 1975 I had begun making cramped, secretive notes about the mysterious bald-headed man I had known in New Orleans. For the first time since the assassination, the Establishment was expressing suspicions of conspiracy, pushing for a Congressional probe of the events in Dallas. Only recently I had been called by CBS and someone from
Reader’s Digest
was even attempting to contact me. Expecting that before long I would be called before a Congressional committee to testify, I didn’t want to divulge anything sensational until I could speak under oath.
     
    Instead, I prepared — quietly. As soon as my notes were completed to the point where they told a coherent, if abbreviated, story — I began discretely searching for a politically radical attorney. Employed part-time as a student assistant and distrustful of the Establishment because of their dishonesty in the past about the assassination issue, I wanted a lawyer who was an idealist because, neither financially nor politically, could I afford any other kind. If my information was relevant, and I believed now that it probably was, doing anything useful with it was still going for a long shot.
     
    On the other hand, I was less worried than ever about seeming paranoid. If one thing had been made perfectly clear, it was that in the United States of America suspicions of conspiracy were no longer regarded as symptoms of mental illness.
     
    In July of 1975 I noted in passing headlines in the local Atlanta papers that city Commissioner of Public Safety, Reginald Eaves, had for some time been quietly investigating anew the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Although I had admired King while I held John Kennedy in contempt, I was then so preoccupied with things I was ferreting out here and there about the Presidential assassination that I failed to take much notice. For articles about the John Kennedy murder now seemed to be appearing everywhere.
     
    From time to time I was meeting to compare notes with a staffer on
The Great Speckled Bird
who had written about the Southern Rim. Without mentioning my man in New Orleans with the bald head and links to Carlos Marcello, I sought further evidence that the cowboys of the military-industrial complex had murdered Kennedy in their way with the Yankees of the Northeastern Establishment. Marcello, as well as Nixon and Howard Hunt, were alleged to belong to this Southern faction. I figured the man I remembered and feared had to be in there somewhere.
     
    Then I encountered an article in a scandal tabloid that disturbed me more than anything else, again for largely subjective reasons. One of their correspondents who was probing links between Carlos Marcello and the John Kennedy murder had blown his brains out with a .38 caliber pistol for no particular reason. As it happened, this resident of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, named Joe Cooper was lefthanded and the weapon was found in his right hand. The former girlfriend of the man with whom I discussed murdering the President met with much the same fate in 1964, just before I returned to New Orleans after a year’s absence to visit.
     
    Then early one morning the phone rang. On the other end of the line was the ACLU lawyer who at that time was the only other person with whom I had confided about the conversations summarized in my notes. One afternoon, after deciding I wanted him to handle my case when the time came, I had regaled him with a rambling, slightly hysterical account of my worst suspicions.
     
    Now he was to ask me, “Have you been following this investigation by Eaves of the Martin Luther King assassination?”
     
    I admitted I had not. “You might want to look into it,” he said. “Their