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

were incarcerated. The two men had grown close, and Marcello had come to regard Van Laningham almost like a son, as someone he protected and to whom he dispensed fatherly advice.
    But Van Laningham was far more than just Marcello’s good friend—he was also an active undercover informant for the FBI.
    After the House Select Committee on Assassinations officially concluded in 1979 that Carlos Marcello—along with his closest mob ally, godfather Santo Trafficante—had the “motive, means, and opportunity to assassinate President Kennedy,” it referred the matter to the Justice Department for further investigation. It appeared to the press and public that nothing was done with the Committee’s referral and that Justice officially closed the matter in 1988.
    However, we now know that a major, extremely secret undercover investigation of Marcello—code-named CAMTEX (for CArlos Marcello, TEXas)—did go forward from 1985 to 1986. CAMTEX used FBI informant Jack Van Laningham not only to obtain Marcello’s 1985 JFK confession but to glean additional details as well, including some in conversations secretly taped by the FBI. The tapes includeMarcello describing how he committed the crime, including his pre-assassination meetings with Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby. However, apparently, for political reasons, high officials in the Reagan–Bush Administration and Justice Department decided not to reveal CAMTEX and Marcello’s JFK confession to Congress, the press, or the public—either in 1986 when CAMTEX ended or in 1992 when Congress passed the JFK Assassination Records Act to release all government files about the crime.
    The Review Board created by the JFK Act was set to expire in September 1998, and the FBI waited until near the end to dump almost a hundred pages of CAMTEX files on the Board staff. It’s doubtful that any Review Board members saw Marcello’s confession files or that any of the Board’s staff—overwhelmed by even larger last-minute document dumping by the CIA—got more than a cursory glance at a few pages of CAMTEX files before their office closed for good.
    Over the next seven years, researchers found less than a handful of scattered pages at the National Archives, some with more than 90 percent of the page blacked out, making them impossible to understand. Finally, in 2006, after months of intense effort and with the help of National Archives staff, I located the main trove of CAMTEX files given to the Review Board, and they were almost completely uncensored. The public first heard about Marcello’s JFK confession files in TV news and newspaper coverage accompanying the 2008 publication of the hardcover of my book Legacy of Secrecy , which also contained interviews with key CAMTEX FBI personnel. In 2009 I partnered with a division of NBC News for a Discovery Channel special ( Did the Mob Kill JFK? ), which also involved locating Jack Van Laningham, who had maintained a very low profile since his release from prison.
    This book contains startling new revelations about Marcello’s confession and CAMTEX from declassified FBI files, from former Bureau informant Jack Van Laningham, and from key FBI personnel involved in the undercover operation. Since 2009 I have conducted numerous exclusive in-person and phone interviews with Van Laningham, adding to and clarifying important parts of the story told by the FBI files and by the FBI agents involved. It’s remarkable how much of that information confirms many of the most crucial discoveries of the House Select Committee and of historians such as Marcello’s biographer, John H. Davis (whose 1989 book Mafia Kingfish remains the only definitive biography of the godfather). In turn, the Committee’s findings, other government investigators, and noted historians and journalists buttress almost all the key points of the new CAMTEX revelations.
    Credibility is always important in evaluating information about JFK’s assassination, and the CAMTEX revelations about