his Texas home to reminisce with old Chicago comrades. They met over
meals, at places that had once been their hangouts. Most of them were
also retired, gray and beefy. They wore open-necked shirts and khakis
or jeans. Back in their bureau days they had been a lean and edgy
crew—dark suits and ties were standard attire. Together they had put
the first cracks in the previously impervious shell of Chicago's
Mafia, known as the Outfit.
Now Shelton was on a similarly quixotic task. He believed a small-time
criminal locked up in an Illinois prison may have committed the
greatest crime of their time. His name was James Files, and he had
once been a driver for the Outfit's most feared hit man. Files told
Shelton both he and the hit man were in Dallas when John F. Kennedy
was assassinated. Files even claimed that he had fired the fatal shot
from behind a fence on the infamous grassy knoll.
Shelton knew it sounded preposterous, but he had reason to take Files
seriously. When he repeated the Files confession to his old buddies,
Shelton was prepared to be laughed out of the restaurant. Instead,
they all listened intently. In fact, like Shelton, some of them also
had their own revelations about the assassination or knew other agents
who had. They regretted never having had a forum in which to air them.
"There's one thing about FBI agents," says Shelton. "They're damn good
investigators. They don't operate on the basis of theories. They deal
in facts, and the facts have never supported the Warren Commission's
conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin."
The evidence, Shelton believes, shows that organized crime
orchestrated Kennedy's murder. An increasing number of historians
agree, but they still don't know who the shooter—or shooters—may have
been. There is also virtually no understanding of the Outfit's role in
the conspiracy.
Read If Special Agent Shelton learned any lesson during his eight
years in Chicago, it was never to underestimate the Outfit or Tony
Accardo, the man at its helm for five decades. Unlike the Mafia dons
on the East Coast, Accardo had little interest in the public spotlight
or absolute power. After he took control of the Outfit, in the
mid-1940s, he built what is now acknowledged to be the biggest empire
in the history of American organized crime, with rackets extending
from Chicago to California.
Accardo was willing to divide the spoils by geography rather than by
family. Inside Chicago that meant five groups, each with its own boss.
Although most of these mob bosses were Italian, they were not
necessarily related to those who worked for them. Their associates and
underlings could be Greek, Jewish or German. Depending on where an
illegal act took place, unaffiliated criminals—even weekend poker
players—had to pay a street tax to the local Outfit boss. Failure to
pay could result in a beating or death.
Shelton's fellow agent Jim Wagner transferred to Chicago from New York
and immediately recognized how crime in Chicago was organized. "The
Outfit had a superior business model because it used geography instead
of family," he explains. "You didn't have the blood feuds like in New
York, where different families fought over the same territory."
Nothing fueled the Outfit's expansion as much as its influence on
unions—the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in particular. The
union's pension fund, which was run out of Chicago, financed
construction of the Outfit's first casinos on the Las Vegas Strip. As
he did in his hometown, Accardo was willing to let other mobsters
play—but on his terms.
A key component of the Outfit's success was its infiltration of the
Democratic Party in Chicago's First Ward. Mob operatives influenced
the election of judges, who then found reasons to throw out charges
against the Outfit. The mob's political connections also helped it buy
voting cards from residents of Chicago's public housing projects that
it could then punch for its favored candidates. When a slender margin
in Illinois ensured Kennedy's electoral victory over Richard Nixon in
1960, Shelton says, "the mob really did believe it gave Kennedy the
election."
If that was true, the Kennedy administration showed little gratitude.
Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy made organized crime his signature
issue, lighting a fire under J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI, which had
previously gone easy on the Mafia. In the last year of the Eisenhower
administration the Justice Department convicted only 35 low-level
mobsters. By the end of 1963 RFK had pushed that number to 288,
including high-ranking bosses. More alarming for the Outfit, while it
was using the Teamsters pension fund to build casinos, RFK targeted
Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa with a team of investigators known as
the Get Hoffa squad. The squad's first indictments against the union
leader were for accepting payoffs from trucking companies and for
subsequent jury tampering in those trials. In the summer of 1963 it
brought new charges involving pension funds.
Five months later, JFK was assassinated. G. Robert Blakey, then a
member of RFK's Justice Department, was well aware of what organized
crime had at stake in snuffing out the Kennedy administration's
onslaught. "It seemed obvious that if there was a conspiracy, it would
be from the mob," says Blakey. In Brothers, a recent book on RFK,
author David Talbot quotes Bobby telling a confidant after JFK's
assassination: "If anyone was involved, it was organized crime."
According to Blakey, neither Hoover nor JFK's successor, Lyndon Baines
Johnson, wanted to open that can of worms. "The risks of where that
investigation would lead were too high," says Blakey. "It was much
more convenient for Oswald to be the lone assassin."
In the late 1970s Blakey served as chief counsel for the U.S. House
Select Committee on Assassinations, which took a second look at the
Warren Commission's findings. On the basis of acoustical evidence,
Blakey's investigators determined there was a "high probability" that
more than one gunman fired at the president and that "individual
members" of "organized crime" may have been involved. The committee
also found that Hoover had kept the FBI's organized crime task force
out of the investigation and didn't pursue leads tying Oswald and his
killer, Jack Ruby, to the Mafia.
But back in 1963, if the Warren Commission had called in the FBI
agents monitoring the Outfit, it probably wouldn't have learned much.
Although it was the dawn of electronic surveillance and mob leaders
were supposedly unaware of the bugs planted in their meeting places,
the FBI never had enough information to bring a major case against the
Outfit in the 1960s. "Unfortunately," Blakey says, "we learned later
that the surveillance was incomplete."
In Chicago, for example, agents never fully understood the executive
nature of the Outfit's hierarchy. They thought Sam "Momo" Giancana
ruled the Outfit. Giancana was the Chicago mob's most flamboyant boss
after Al Capone, but he remained in power only until 1965. It's now
clear Giancana always answered to Accardo. According to Blakey, no bug
or wiretap ever caught Accardo talking to Giancana. Because of
Accardo's understated ways, the media, law enforcement and even some
local criminals never completely knew the extent of his control.
When Zack Shelton transferred to the FBI's Chicago office in 1978, his
first case involved the murders of several burglars who had broken
into Accardo's home. It was natural to assume the mob boss had ordered
their executions. For a few weeks it appeared the 28-year-old agent
and his partner would put Accardo behind bars for the first time in
his long criminal career. "During the investigation we pulled the
phone records of everyone we could think of," Shelton remembers. The
agents could see a call alerting Accardo to a break-in at his house
and then the crime boss's call to his right-hand man, Joey Aiuppa,
down the chain of command to Aiuppa's driver, Gerry Carusiello,
another longtime burglar, who did the dirty work.
The agents learned enough to impanel a grand jury. The first time he
saw Accardo, Shelton understood why people underestimated his
brutality. At 73, Accardo dressed in conservatively tailored suits and
looked more like a retired corporate executive than a crime lord.
Accardo covered his tracks with ruthless efficiency. Carusiello was
killed before he could testify. Accardo's longtime Italian houseman,
who testified to a grand jury in broken English, may have said too
much, because he soon disappeared. Shelton got a warrant to search
Accardo's home for signs of the witness's whereabouts but could find
nothing other than a pair of prescription glasses at the bottom of an
incinerator.
When the agents searched Accardo's enormous basement—which was as big
as the upper floor of the opulent house—they found a hidden walk-in
safe. Inside were stacks of new bills that totaled $275,000. Shelton
and his partner traced the money to Las Vegas. However, the FBI had
just begun to investigate how the Outfit had skimmed cash from casino
counting rooms. Rather than blow that operation, they returned the
funds to Accardo and never brought charges against him for the deaths.
The investigation could not have had a more unsatisfying outcome for
Shelton. "About all we managed to do was keep that money from him for
about 18 months," he says. "But God, it sure was an interesting case."
If nothing else, this case taught Shelton two important lessons about
Accardo: The mob leader knew no mercy when it came to insulating
himself from a serious crime, and Shelton had seen for himself the
sort of cash that gushed from Las Vegas. Only years later did he
realize these lessons could shed light on the assassination of JFK.
•Around the time of the burglary investigation, Shelton had a much
more run-of-the-mill case against a ring of hijackers. The group's
members would overpower truckers at rest stops and abscond with the
entire tractor trailer.
The crew was led by James Files, who was the sort of white man with no
overt ethnicity that mobsters called a hillbilly. In fact, Files was
born into a broken home in Alabama but raised by a single mother in
the tough Italian neighborhood of a Chicago suburb. Shelton had no
idea how Files fit into the crazy-quilt pattern of the Outfit. "All I
knew was that he had to have the blessings of the mob to be operating
on that scale."
Shelton used another hillbilly to infiltrate Files's crew. It was only
a matter of time before the agent built a case for the interstate
transport of stolen goods. Then one day Shelton debriefed his
informant about a trip he had taken to Dallas with Files. As usual,
they were hauling stolen vehicles, but when they passed through Dealey
Plaza, the snitch told Shelton, "Files went weird on me. He said, 'If
the American people really knew what happened there, they wouldn't
know how to handle it.'"
The comment seemed so bizarre that neither the informant nor the FBI
agent knew what to make of it. "There was no reason for this guy to
make up that story about Files," Shelton says. "And Files was the last
person I'd expect to comment about JFK's assassination or any topic of
that kind, but it sounded as though he really knew what happened.
Maybe because it was so unexpected, it stuck with me."
Over the next decade Shelton and the other agents in the organized
crime unit turned the tide against Accardo. With Operation Strawman,
Shelton's team caught the Outfit selling casinos to the Kansas City
mob. The investigation won the 1986 conviction of 78-year-old Aiuppa,
who spent the next 10 years in prison. During the same period
Shelton's squad also tapped the lines of the Teamsters pension fund
offices to bring charges against union leaders. "I loved being in
Chicago," says Shelton. "Every day was different and exciting, and we
did a hell of a lot of good."
Shelton didn't think about Files again until 1992, after he had been
transferred to the FBI office in Beaumont, Texas. He read in a local
newspaper about Joe Hugh West, a private investigator and former
Baptist preacher from Houston who claimed to have revelations
regarding JFK's murder. As Shelton skimmed the article, two Outfit
names jumped off the page: Charles Nicoletti, a notorious hit man, and
Johnny Roselli, the Outfit's first enforcer in Las Vegas. West claimed
he had a source who could place both men in Dallas on November 22,
1963.
Although Shelton was vaguely familiar with the conclusions of the
House Select Committee on Assassinations, he had yet to hear anyone
claim that Outfit heavyweights had been involved—especially Nicoletti
or Roselli, who could not have acted without Accardo's approval.
Shelton gave the private investigator a call. Although West had a
reputation as a huckster (he held his press conferences in front of a
banner emblazoned with TRUTH, INC.), he seemed sincere about finding
the culprits behind JFK's assassination. He revealed the ex-con who
had been his source for the information about Nicoletti and Roselli.
"I even went to court and got immunity for the guy so he couldn't be
convicted for any crime he told us about," Shelton says. "But I pretty
quickly caught him in a couple of lies. I told Joe, 'Don't take
anything this guy says to the bank.' When Joe heard that, it was as if
the life went out of him. I felt sorry for the man, so I said, 'If you
can track down a guy named James Files, he might have some good
information.'"
Shelton returned to Beaumont and was warned by his supervisor never
again to mention JFK. Shelton expected the matter to be closed in
early 1993 when he read that West had died following heart surgery.
Soon after, West's lawyer, Don Irvin, called to announce that "the
crusade lives on." Irvin told Shelton that West had succeeded in
tracking Files to a state prison in Illinois, where he was doing the
equivalent of a life sentence for the attempted murder of a cop. Files
had initially rebuffed West, but the former preacher persevered
through phone calls, a visit and extensive correspondence. The
prisoner was devastated to learn of West's sudden death.
As a tribute to West, Files agreed to talk extensively to Irvin, who
then relayed what he heard to Shelton. He had much more to say than
anyone anticipated. Files told of being remanded for a court-martial
from the Army after he was charged with shooting other soldiers in
Laos in 1960, but he then claimed to have been plucked out of a
veterans' hospital during a psychiatric evaluation and recruited to
train anti-Castro Cubans in Florida. After the 1961 Bay of Pigs
fiasco, Files said, he returned home with a chip on his shoulder
against his nation and the president. Nicoletti saw him racing stock
cars and tapped him to be his driver.
For most Chicago mobsters, muscular Charles Nicoletti—nearly six feet
tall and with a lantern jaw—could be a frightening sight.
Nevertheless, he defied the stereotypes of a mob killer. On most days
he wore a suit and tie. His hangouts included insurance agencies, car
dealerships and a company that made burial vaults.
Despite the businessman trappings, Nicoletti was the son of an abusive
father, whom he killed at the age of 12 after the man beat his mother.
The Outfit became his family, and Nicoletti worked his way up the
ranks by dealing dope and making book, for which he was repeatedly
arrested and jailed. Inside the mob, Nicoletti's intelligence and
heartlessness made him effective as an enforcer. Charles Crimaldi,
another hit man who had turned informant, called Nicoletti "the most
respected and the most dangerous" man in the Outfit, adding, "He don't
want to impress anybody. He just wants to go about his business."
By the early 1960s police believed Nicoletti was the Outfit's
third-ranked leader and right-hand man to Giancana. At this stage
Nicoletti's skills were reserved for only the most sensitive
contracts, and when he went out with another hit man, Files claimed to
be the third man behind the wheel.
Despite Nicoletti's fearsome reputation, Files called him "Mr.
Nicoletti" and said he was the closest thing to a father figure he
ever had.
During his discussions with Irvin, Files gave vivid accounts of the
weeks leading up to the assassination. Then 21, he was playing pinball
at his favorite hangout when Nicoletti first told him that Giancana
had put out a contract on "your friend"—the president. Nicoletti
instructed Files to acquire the weapons and bring them to Texas in the
hidden trunk compartment of a 1963 Chevrolet, a "work" car that
couldn't be traced.
Files told Irvin the following story about his journey to Dallas: He
stayed in a courtyard motel on the western outskirts of Dallas and met
Lee Harvey Oswald, who took him downtown to point out the best escape
routes from the city. Oswald also took him to an abandoned field,
where Files test-fired guns hidden in the trunk. (Oswald, he said,
didn't want to shoot.) Upon their return to the motel Oswald took a
picture of him standing shirtless next to his portable record player—a
photo Files kept but one that would have been more telling had it
included the photographer.
Files claimed he made contact with another Outfit leader on November
21. Early that morning he drove to the swanky Cabana Motor Hotel in
Dallas, where he picked up Johnny Roselli. Then 58, Roselli had
carefully cut silver hair and wore tinted glasses and silk suits. He
was every bit the flashy mob kingpin Nicoletti was not, but back in
his younger Chicago days Roselli was equally feared as a hit man. By
1963 he was hanging out at the Friars Club in Los Angeles with his pal
Frank Sinatra and was caught a few years later in an elaborate
card-cheating scheme. It brought him a brief prison sentence and a
permanent ban from Las Vegas casinos. In Dallas, Files said, he took
Roselli to a pancake house, where he met Jack Ruby.
According to Files, Nicoletti did not join him until the morning of
November 22. The two went to Dealey Plaza, using as a guide a map of
the motorcade route that Roselli had gotten from Ruby. He and
Nicoletti picked a spot in the Dal-Tex tower (next to the Texas School
Book Depository, where Oswald worked) for Nicoletti to shoot from.
Only then, Files says, did the hit man ask him to be a backup.
Nicoletti feared Roselli was too rusty to hit a target from a long
distance, and he knew Files had been trained as a sniper in the Army.
Files said he set up behind the stockade fence on the grassy knoll to
get a shot from the front of the procession. The weapon he chose was a
Remington Fireball, a cross between a rifle and a pistol that could
fit inside an attaché case. Nicoletti's one instruction was not to hit
Jackie. Files followed the motorcade through the scope of his
Remington and shot a .222 caliber bullet that hit the president in the
right temple. He then casually took off his jacket, turned it inside
out and put his gun back in its case.
During his brief encounter with Oswald, Files said, the two did not
discuss each other's mission. He believed Oswald never fired a shot
and was unwittingly there as a patsy—as Oswald himself said after his
arrest. Other hit men were in town to kill Oswald, but he slipped away
before they got to him—the major glitch in the day's operation.
For Irvin, James Files was the missing link to the real conspiracy
behind the JFK assassination. Irvin wanted Shelton to interview Files
to make sure he didn't turn out to be as flaky as West's previous
sources.
"I thought some of what Files said was a little too good to be true,"
Shelton admits. "That was my first impression. But I thought there was
a ring of truth to it, too. Nicoletti was the perfect person for the
Outfit to send. I could understand why it wanted Roselli in Dallas
too, because they trusted him to operate things. But at that stage of
his life Roselli couldn't have been a shooter. It made sense that
Nicoletti would have wanted someone else to back him up."
But nothing about the Files story was more compelling for Shelton than
the fates of the three central Outfit characters: All of them had been
killed in the mid-1970s after being summoned by congressional
committees: Giancana and Roselli around the time of a Senate
investigation and Nicoletti just a day after one of Blakey's
investigators called looking for him. All had ranked high enough in
the mob's hierarchy to have directly implicated Accardo and Aiuppa in
a conspiracy to kill the president. Was Accardo covering his tracks?
Shelton's efforts to interview Files in 1993 were leaked to the press
by one of Irvin's associates, and the FBI wouldn't allow it. The
bureau instead sent two other agents to interview the Illinois
prisoner, and they deemed his information unworthy of further
investigation. Shelton watched from the sidelines as TV impresario
Dick Clark produced a show for NBC based on Files's confession. At the
last minute the network brought in consultants who declared Files a
fraud, and the program was scrubbed.
Shelton still wouldn't let go of the Files story. Although he realized
it had many holes, he says, "There was just too much detail for him to
have made everything up." After he retired from the FBI in 1998 and
opened his own private investigation firm, he approached Clark about
getting the Files story back on the air. "Dick Clark had me out to his
office," Shelton recalls, "and I think he believed there was something
to pursue, but he had just been burned too badly to try again."
Meanwhile, Joe West's organization had splintered. Some of the pieces
had been picked up by a Dutch investor, Wim Dankbaar, who offered to
cover Shelton's expenses if he could corroborate Files's claims.
(Dankbaar used some of Shelton's research in his book and video, Files
on JFK.)
For Shelton that collaboration came with the discovery of two men who
claimed independently that they had helped bring the hit men to
Dallas. Chauncey Marvin Holt said he drove Nicoletti from a ranch in
Arizona, and William Robert Plumlee said he flew Roselli into town the
day before the assassination. Each man had spent a significant part of
his life on the Gulf Coast, and each had connections to the mob, the
CIA and Cuba.
According to an extensive FBI file, Plumlee claimed he made his first
clandestine flights to Cuba in support of Castro, supplying guns
mobsters had stolen from a National Guard armory. He served time for
passing a bad check but was still used as a contract pilot by the CIA,
helping to equip such right-wing guerrilla groups as Oliver North's
Contras. Plumlee claimed his CIA contacts had ordered him to fly
Roselli to Dallas the day before the assassination.
The CIA connection with Roselli was not farfetched. It is now known
that in 1960 the CIA approached Roselli through a Las Vegas hotel
executive (and former FBI agent) to assist in a plan to assassinate
Castro. Roselli introduced the go-between to Giancana and Tampa mob
boss Santo Trafficante Jr., who had casinos expropriated by Castro and
was briefly jailed in Cuba after the revolution. The CIA supplied
poison that a Trafficante confederate was supposed to slip into
Castro's food, but nothing came of the effort.
Roselli testified about the escapade when it was revealed in 1975
during the hearings into Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign
Leaders led by Idaho senator Frank Church. But Roselli may have talked
too freely. He disappeared within weeks of his third appearance before
the committee, in 1976. His body was found sawed in half and stuffed
inside an oil drum floating off Biscayne Bay. His death so rattled
Plumlee that he contacted local FBI agents to inform them of his role
in bringing Roselli to Dallas, but he claimed the effort was to
"abort" the assassination, not assist it.
Chauncey Holt, who said he brought Nicoletti to Dallas, had a
background even more problematic than Plumlee's. He admitted to having
worked as an accountant for businesses owned by gangster Meyer Lansky.
Holt also worked for Peter Licavoli, a leader of Detroit's Mafia and a
supporter of Jimmy Hoffa. Holt said he met Nicoletti and Ohio hit man
Leo Moceri (who disappeared in 1976, shortly after Hoffa) at
Licavoli's ranch in Tucson and drove the two to Dallas. They intended
to arrive on November 21 but did not get into town until the morning
of the assassination because of car trouble. Holt claimed he was the
oldest-looking member of the three "tramps"—the apparent vagrants
found in a boxcar after the assassination and photographed as they
were marched into Dallas police headquarters. They were held briefly,
and their true identities have been a source of speculation among
conspiracy theorists ever since.
Holt also claimed to have been in another iconic shot—of Lee Harvey
Oswald in New Orleans, a few months before the assassination, during
an anti-Castro demonstration. Holt was photographed standing to the
side ready to lend moral support as Oswald faced down demonstrators.
Holt said that in addition to working for mobsters he provided
contract services for the CIA. A trained artist, he forged documents,
including the alias ID card Oswald used to purchase the
Mannlicher-Carcano rifle, the supposed assassination weapon. He said
he had also created counterfeit Secret Service credentials for others
to use in Dallas. Holt first "came out" as a conspirator in a 1991
Newsweek article and sat for several interviews, some videotaped,
before his death from cancer, in 1997. Although he never admitted
knowing who had orchestrated the assassination, he did speculate that
the presence in Dallas of people like him, with such murky backgrounds
in both crime and espionage, may have been part of the plan to "muddy
the waters."
In 2002 Shelton traveled to San Diego to meet with Holt's daughter,
who had her father's videotapes. Later, Shelton had dinner with a
retired FBI agent, who asked why he was in town. When Shelton told him
about Files, the agent replied with his own story from when he worked
on the Teamsters pension fund case. He had monitored a wiretapped
conversation between a pension executive and a Hoffa bodyguard. "He
heard [the bodyguard] say that Ruby made all these calls to Chicago
before the assassination. That always bothered him because the Warren
Commission concluded that Ruby had no significant tie to the
underworld. All these years he knew that was bullshit, but there was
no one he could talk to about it."
The dinner was an epiphany for Shelton. "I realized there had to be
other agents who think they know something about the assassination. I
just had to reach out to them."
When Shelton returned to Chicago later that year to excavate the
memories of his bureau colleagues, he was most interested in the
response of Jim Wagner, who had led the organized crime unit. Wagner
became the FBI's foremost Outfit expert and was a tower of integrity.
"Jim listened to me talk a little about the Outfit and the
assassination, and then he said, 'Zack, I think you're right on.'"
Like Shelton, Wagner had his own unexpected brush with JFK history. In
his case, it happened in 1989 when the feds revealed that a mob
attorney had put a wire on one of the Outfit's most important
political operatives in the First Ward. A few Outfit soldiers came
forward to wear wires so they wouldn't go to prison. One of them was
Lenny Patrick. In his prime, Patrick controlled the Outfit's
bookmaking and juice operations on Chicago's West Side. By the time
Wagner worked with him, he was 76, "a crotchety old man," Wagner
remembers, "sickly but still dangerous."
Before Patrick would meet his mob boss, he would first go to a safe
house, where Wagner would fit him with a concealed recorder. The agent
also gave him cash to feed his loan sharks so the FBI could build
extortion cases against them, too. It wasn't long before Wagner
suspected Patrick of stealing some of that money.
One day when Patrick showed up at the safe house Wagner was waiting
for him with a lie detector. "I told Lenny an examiner was on his way
to strap him into the polygraph so I could find out what he was doing
with the cash." Patrick confessed to stealing it. In the spirit of the
moment, the agent decided to ask about a few other subjects as well.
Wagner had once been a history teacher and was always fascinated by
the assassination. He remembered Patrick was supposedly a friend of
Jack Ruby's.
Patrick had always downplayed their relationship, but he admitted to
Wagner that he had been "Rubenstein's" mentor in the Outfit, having
plucked him out of a boxing club. Patrick said he taught him how to be
a bookie, and when Ruby's best friend was killed for taking bets
without paying his street tax, Patrick was the one who banished Ruby
to Dallas. Patrick admitted he was one of the last to speak with Ruby
before he killed Oswald.
After hearing that, Wagner said, "I backed up, and I asked, 'Then who
hit Kennedy?'"
"He said, 'We did it.'"
"'But who did it?'"
"'You know. Momo [Giancana] had the main guys there.'"
"When I pressed him to tell me exactly who, he clammed up. He said he
had told me enough and didn't want to talk about it anymore. But then
he said, 'It was us, and we'll have to pay for it.'"
•If the Outfit had supplied the firepower for the assassination and
the cleanup with Ruby, as Lenny Patrick told Wagner, then who groomed
Lee Harvey Oswald as the patsy? For Shelton there is one indisputable
candidate—a longtime Accardo ally from Oswald's hometown with both
the motivation and the energy to choreograph JFK's assassination.
His name was Carlos Marcello. Short in stature and bullnecked, he was
known as the Little Man or the Godfather of the Gulf Coast. When
Shelton asked Chicago agents about the assassination, one referred him
to his brother, Michael Wacks, also an agent, who had spent a year
working undercover on a sting involving Marcello.
Like Accardo, Marcello came to power in the 1940s. Like Accardo, he
enjoyed unusual longevity for a mob boss, with domination of his home
turf and an expansive reach that extended throughout the Gulf Coast.
Unlike Accardo, however, he maintained a high profile as a civic
leader, real estate tycoon and owner of a popular restaurant and hotel
in New Orleans. But if an associate had his confidence, he'd identify
certain out-of-town partners by saying, in his gangster patois, "Dey
Maf, like me."
Marcello was a partner with Tampa boss Trafficante and the Outfit in
several different rackets. Most often the Southern bosses were junior
partners to Chicago because the Outfit controlled the union leaders
who gave access to pension funds. But in 1963 Marcello and Trafficante
wanted their own piece of the Las Vegas bonanza, and like prospectors
at a gold rush they were eager to stake their claim on the Strip
before it was too late.
Their plans hinged on a loan from the Teamsters pension fund. They
courted Hoffa to do the deal, but Hoffa was distracted by indictments
from RFK's Justice Department. Marcello was no more a fan of Bobby
than the union leader was. As attorney general, Kennedy deported
Marcello to Guatemala, where he was stranded for a few days in a
jungle before he could return to the U.S. It was a story the affable
Marcello could not retell without sputtering in rage.
The mob bosses' go-between with the Teamsters was Trafficante's
trusted trial lawyer Frank Ragano, who was also defending Hoffa
against the government's charges. According to Ragano, in August 1963,
when the mob bosses had the lawyer approach Hoffa yet again about the
loan, the union leader responded, "The time has come for your friend
[Trafficante] and Carlos to get rid of him. Kill that son of a bitch
John Kennedy."
At breakfast the next morning in a corner of Marcello's restaurant,
Ragano passed along Hoffa's request. He expected the mob bosses to
laugh it off, but they responded instead with stony silence. Looking
back on the incident in his 1994 memoir, Ragano wondered whether the
assassination conspiracy was already under way.
Marcello discussed the Kennedys with a former Las Vegas promoter.
Explaining that he needed to chop off the head of the dog (JFK) so the
tail (RFK) would die, he told the promoter that he would find a "nut"
his people could manipulate into taking the blame.
Marcello's "nut" could have been Oswald, who grew up in Marcello's
fiefdom. According to Blakey's investigators, Oswald's uncle, a
bookie, and his mother had connections to Marcello. Another mutual
acquaintance was David Ferrie, who was Oswald's childhood friend and
an anti-Castro activist. Ferrie worked as a private investigator for
Marcello's lawyer and was in court with him on the day of the
assassination. Ferrie died of a cerebral aneurysm soon after New
Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison fingered him as a
co-conspirator in JFK's assassination.
Conspiracy theorists who believe Oswald was manipulated by others
typically blame agents associated with the CIA or Cuba—not the mob. Of
all Oswald's activities before the assassination, none have led to
more speculation about espionage than his trip to Mexico City from
September 27 to October 2, 1963. As he did in New Orleans, Oswald made
another public display of his affections for Cuba by visiting the
nation's embassy and requesting a visa to travel there. CIA
headquarters later destroyed photos of Oswald entering the embassy and
tapes of him calling there.
But according to Jim Wagner, there could have been a mercenary purpose
for Oswald's trip. Looking through FBI archives, Wagner discovered
that Accardo sent a courier with $100,000 in cash to Mexico City the
same weekend Oswald was there. It may have been a coincidence, since
the Outfit did have extensive interests in Mexico City. Or the Outfit
may have been in a better position than Marcello to pay off Oswald.
In the days after the assassination Oswald's various pro-Castro
activities seemed "too pat—too obvious" to Deputy Attorney General
Nicholas Katzenbach, who had taken control of the Justice Department
when RFK could no longer function. If the CIA or anti-Castro interests
had planned to use the assassination as an excuse to invade Cuba, they
quickly backed off.
And if the mob had used the assassination to muzzle the Justice
Department, it could not have been more successful. Over the next
three years the workload of federal organized crime prosecutors would
be cut in half; their time in front of grand juries was reduced by 72
percent. President Johnson was not the threat to organized crime JFK
had been—which was probably no surprise for Marcello, whose domain
extended to Texas. Shelton uncovered reports that the Little Man
regularly paid off LBJ. According to one of his sources, a wealthy San
Antonio investor named Morris Jaffe "used to take bags of cash" from
Marcello to LBJ—even when Johnson was in the White House. By the time
Shelton heard this story, Jaffe had died, so he called Jaffe's son.
"When I asked him if that was true," Shelton says, "he answered, 'My
dad knew a lot of people. He was close to J. Edgar Hoover, too.'"
•In 1981 Trafficante and Accardo were both indicted for a kickback
scheme involving a Tampa union. Although they beat that rap,
Trafficante was indicted on another charge in 1986. The next year,
shortly before his death, he told lawyer Ragano, "Carlos fucked up. We
shouldn't have killed Giovanni. We should have killed Bobby."
Carlos Marcello had his own troubles with the feds. In the early 1980s
he was convicted in a sting known as Operation Brilab. Agent Mike
Wacks pretended to be a crooked insurance executive. In return for
kickbacks, the Little Man opened doors to politicians and union
executives across the country.
After a long career in the FBI, Wacks thought he had seen it all, but
this sting opened his eyes even wider. "Mob guys like Accardo and
Marcello felt like they ran a separate government," he says. "Marcello
knew right off the top of his head who was amenable to kickbacks,
whether it was a politician or a union figure, across his whole
region. Not just in Texas and Louisiana, but Mississippi, Arkansas and
Oklahoma." Wacks was ready to rope in the Outfit when a leak to the
press brought the sting to an abrupt end.
During his year undercover, Wacks became close with Marcello. "He was
pushing 70, but I only wished I worked so hard. He could have hundreds
of deals going at the same time and bounce around until 3:30 a.m. with
a girlfriend half his age. Then at seven the next morning he'd call to
see why you weren't at work already."
Even decades later, Wacks says, Marcello could not hide his hatred for
the Kennedys. "Historians don't understand the loyalty mob bosses felt
politicians owed them. They thought they were on the same level. If
they put someone into power and he didn't do their bidding, their
solution was to take him out."
Even though Wacks was exposed as an agent, Marcello remained cordial
to him. "We had spent so much time together," Wacks explains, "that
the old man treated me almost like a son."
After Marcello went to prison for Brilab in 1983, he suffered a
stroke. Doctors believed he was in the early stages of Alzheimer's,
and he started muttering in his sleep about the Kennedy assassination.
A plan was devised to transfer him to a federal prison hospital in
Minnesota and embed an agent as his cell mate to record the nocturnal
admissions. Again, word leaked out and the operation was aborted.
Wacks did not believe such subterfuge was necessary. When he went to
visit him in prison, he found Marcello as lucid as ever. The old man
refused to talk about the assassination with the case agent Wacks
brought from Dallas, but he told Wacks, "If I ever get out of here,
you come to see me with my lawyer, and I'll explain my involvement
with dat thing."
Only 18 months later, in 1990, Marcello's convictions were overturned
and he was released. But Wacks's superiors would not permit him to
take Marcello up on his offer. "That really pissed me off," says
Wacks. "I said to my boss, 'What's it going to harm us?' But he said,
'We don't want to go there.' For some reason, the bureau wanted to
close the book on the assassination. That bugs me to this day."
For G. Robert Blakey, now a professor at the Notre Dame Law School,
what Zack Shelton and the other agents have found adds weight to his
thesis about organized crime's role in the assassination. "Little by
little, more pieces about organized crime's involvement keep coming
out. Nothing of substance has come out on the CIA other than that it
wanted to cover things up. The stories of most substance are related
to organized crime. Trafficante's confession to his lawyer is very
significant. Ragano was in a position to know, and he made notes about
the conversation soon after it took place."
For similar reasons, Blakey says, "I would believe what Lenny Patrick
told Jim Wagner. The phone records showed he was in the middle of
everything with Ruby, and I'm sorry he never felt he could talk to the
House Select Committee."
Blakey is more skeptical about Files. "The acoustical evidence does
show a bullet was fired from the grassy knoll, and it was fired at a
supersonic rate nearly simultaneous with the third shot. But I believe
that bullet missed. If you look at the X-ray evidence of the skull,
it's pretty conclusive the fatal shot came from behind." (The
committee also concluded that bullet fragments taken from Texas
governor John Connally and JFK came from Oswald's Mannlicher-Carcano.
In 2004, however, the science behind the FBI's analysis was
discredited, and the gun that fired the bullets remains unknown.)
Shelton does not dispute Blakey about the shot or that Files may have
embellished his story with information he got from Joe West. Despite
Files's claims about CIA contacts, nothing has ever been found to
corroborate them. Shelton did meet Files in 1998. Files will remain in
prison until 2016, when he will be 74. Shelton says, "I am 100 percent
convinced that Files was there. I'm not sure he made the fatal shot,
but you had the best hired killers in the world there to do it."
Even if Files was no more than a fly on the wall, for Shelton he still
had a unique vantage point. "You talk to some people in this field,
and they think people don't care to know what really happened in
Dallas. But I don't find that to be the case when I talk to other FBI
agents. They are absolutely in awe of this information. It's almost 50
years after the assassination. Don't you think it's time we finally
found out who did it?
The Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald was John F.
Kennedy's lone assassin hangs from a single thread known as the
"single-bullet theory." Since Oswald could have fired only three
shots, and one missed, the theory maintains that the remaining two
bullets killed the president and injured Texas governor John Connally,
who was seated in front of JFK. Without the improbable passage of this
bullet, the commission could not have argued Oswald was the only
shooter. The author of the single-bullet theory is Arlen Specter, who
in 1964 was the commission's assistant counsel. Today he is the
80-year-old senator from Pennsylvania. In his memoir, Passion for
Truth, Specter writes, "I have always been confident that the
single-bullet conclusion is correct. I have also had a sense that if
the conclusion turns out to be incorrect, that would be okay, too,
because it was an honest, good-faith, soundly reasoned judgment."
But according to the testimony of retired FBI agent James Sibert,
Specter, who was the agent's sole contact with the Warren Commission,
misrepresented Sibert's comments and excluded his report on JFK's
autopsy from the official record.
On the afternoon of November 22, 1963 Sibert and his partner, Francis
O'Neill, were summoned to Andrews Air Force base to accompany the
president's body to the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland. As
Sibert testified to the Assassination Record Review Board at the
National Archives in 1997, "We were there to observe, obtain any
bullets [and] hand-carry them to the laboratory to preserve the chain
of evidence."The agents helped lift the coffin from the ambulance and
carry it into the examination room. One or the other agent was then
present while Dr. James Humes conducted the autopsy. Both agents took
meticulous notes. Humes, the chief Navy pathologist, talked through
each step of the procedure. Given Sibert's proximity to such an epic
scene in American history, his memories are vivid. He noted the
entrance wound of the so-called single bullet. It was not in the back
of the neck. Instead, as he wrote in his official report, the bullet
hole was "below the shoulders and two inches to the right of the
middle line of the spinal column." There was no doubt about what he
saw because Humes probed the hole, looking for either the exit wound
or the bullet, and was surprised he could find neither. Sibert
suggested the bullet could have been made of some substance that had
dissolved inside the president. He called headquarters to speak to a
munitions expert but learned instead that a bullet had been found in a
stretcher back at Parkland Memorial, the Dallas hospital where JFK had
been declared dead.
Sibert wrote in his report that when he relayed this news to Humes,
the pathologist speculated that when the Parkland doctors tried to
revive JFK by massaging his heart, "it was entirely possible that
through such movement the bullet had worked its way back out of the
point of entry and had fallen on the stretcher." Humes had already
pointed out that the gash in the president's throat was not an exit
wound but a tracheotomy. He also commented that the Parkland doctors
had closed up the scalp around missing pieces of skull.To complete
their mission at the Naval Hospital the agents retrieved the bullet
fragments that Humes could extract from the corpse. Back in their home
office outside Washington, D.C., Sibert and O'Neill dictated their
report. It was transcribed and mimeographed by an FBI stenographer,
who, along with the agents, signed one copy. According to the bureau's
policy at the time, the agents then destroyed their notepads.
Four months later Specter summoned them to a meeting with no other
witnesses present. Soon after, in a memo to the general counsel,
Specter wrote, "Special Agent Sibert advised that he made no notes
during the autopsy." That statement, Sibert says, "is absolutely
false. There would be no way in the world I'd make a statement that I
made no notes during the autopsy."
Specter never requested further information from the agents. As Sibert
later told the ARRB, "I can now see why for many reasons someone
thought it was inadvisable to bring us before the Warren Commission."
In fact, it was years before Sibert learned that Humes had burned his
original autopsy notes in a fireplace and then altered his findings to
correspond with the single-bullet theory.
In his book Specter claims Humes changed his mind after he consulted
with doctors at Parkland hospital on November 23. But as late as
November 29, in a taped conversation with President Johnson, FBI
director J. Edgar Hoover did not mention a neck wound and told of a
"complete bullet" that "rolled out of the president's head" and was
found in his stretcher.
In Specter's defense, the pressure to put the blame on a lone assassin
could not have been greater, as we learn from Johnson's other November
29 conversations. After speaking with Hoover, LBJ met with Earl Warren
to persuade the reluctant Supreme Court chief justice to head the
investigation. Unless it was brought to the right conclusion, Johnson
argued, there could be nuclear war with the Soviet Union, which would
put "40 million" lives at stake. As Warren later wrote, he replied,
"Mr. President, if the situation is that serious, my personal views do
not count. I will do it."Earlier this year, in a bid for reelection as
senator, Specter lost Pennsylvania's Democratic primary, effectively
ending his political career. Now would be the time for him to open an
honest debate about the conspiracy that killed our 35th
president.—H.L.
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