Free The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination by Lamar Waldron Page A

and/or the CIA. Meanwhile, intelligence assets Banister and Ferrie began to manipulate Oswald for nonintelligence reasons. Both were also working for Carlos Marcello, who was planning to kill President Kennedy to end Robert Kennedy’s war against the godfather and his mob allies.
    Oswald would have been focused on what he thought was his impending mission to Cuba—and his “big reveal,” when he would finally emerge from years of undercover work to fame and fortune. Yet the very actions that helped him build a pro-Castro, pro-Communist image in public for his intelligence work would also make him lookinstantly guilty if he were ever accused of murdering the President. Confessed conspirator John Martino, an associate of Marcello and Trafficante, described the tragic scenario perfectly, telling a trusted associate that Oswald “didn’t know what he was involved in” or “who he was [really] working for—he was just ignorant of who was really putting him together.”
    * A term first applied to Oswald by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.
    * Wecht was reportedly the only member of the Panel without personal or professional ties to the original autopsy doctors and was the only one to disagree with the magic bullet theory.
    * George DeMohrenschildt knew both Jackie Kennedy and George H. W. Bush. On the day an investigator for the House Select Committee on Assassinations was trying to interview him, DeMohrenschildt committed suicide. That same day, Chicago hit man Charles Nicoletti—who worked with Johnny Rosselli on the CIA–Mafia plots in 1963 and was alleged to be in Dallas when JFK was assassinated—was murdered, gangland style. He had also been scheduled to talk to investigators for the House Select Committee.
    * While the House Select Committee looked for US intelligence ties to other defectors in the late 1970s, that was before Blakey wrote for PBS in 2003, “I am no longer confident that the Central Intelligence Agency cooperated with the Committee.”

CHAPTER 3
    A Mafia Godfather Confesses
    O N DECEMBER 15, 1987, godfather Carlos Marcello sat in a gazebo in a prison yard with two close associates, as he railed against John and Robert Kennedy. Aside from those two, no one was in earshot as he hurled curses at the long-dead Kennedy brothers. He had done that before, but this time—since Marcello trusted the two men—he went further than usual in his anti-Kennedy tirade. Normally in careful control of his emotions, Marcello became more and more agitated as he talked about the Kennedys’ crusade against him: First they’d hauled him before Congress, then briefly deported him to Central America, and finally they had him prosecuted in New Orleans, the center of his multistate criminal empire.
    Marcello’s anti-Kennedy rant reached a crescendo as he blurted out to his two friends a startling admission about John F. Kennedy: “Yeah, I had the son of a bitch killed. I’m glad I did.” Marcello’s only regret seemed to be that he didn’t get to pull the trigger, since he told his two stunned associates, “I’m sorry I couldn’t have done it myself.”
    Carlos Marcello had become America’s most powerful godfather by being not just ruthless but also cautious and discreet, and he paused his diatribe after his remarkable confession. Realizing that even thoughhe trusted his two associates he had crossed a line, Marcello turned away from them and simply walked off.
    After Marcello left, his deadly admission hung in the air between the two stunned men who’d heard it. They knew Marcello well enough to know what could happen to them if they ever revealed what they’d just heard. One man told the other, “I don’t know about you, but I did not hear anything.” With that, he walked away as well, leaving fifty-six-year-old Jack Van Laningham alone in the prison yard’s gazebo to ponder the gravity of his situation.
    Van Laningham was Marcello’s cellmate at the Texarkana Federal Correction Institute, where both men