from: http://pages.about.com/search/chapter4.htm Click Here: <A HREF="http://pages.about.com/search/chapter4.htm">Preserving the legacy</A> ----- HOOVER AND THE MAFIA Chapter 4 The astonishing degree of control that Hoover exercised over the Warren Commission gave him the capacity to dictate the "truth" about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The "infallible" Director of the FBI even managed to convince the Warren Commission to keep from publishing the fact that Jack Ruby had been an FBI informant in 1959. Imagine that! Jack Ruby, the organized crime operative who murdered Lee Harvey Oswald had actually developed a secret alliance with Hoover's FBI and Hoover dominated the Warren Commission so absolutely that he managed to hush it up. The secret relationship between Jack Ruby and Hoover's FBI is one of the links in a long chain of events which connects J. Edgar Hoover and the Mafia to the point where it is practically impossible to distinguish one from the other. Indeed, when Hoover fraudulently insisted that there was no significant link between Jack Ruby and organized crime, the absurd claim was obviously self-serving -Hoover desperately denied Ruby's obvious links to organized crime in order to conceal his own covert relationship with the Mafia. The Mafia owed its very existence to the capacity to corrupt law enforcement officials. Indeed, as long as law enforcement officials like J. Edgar Hoover fraudulently claimed that organized crime did not exist, the Mafia was free to grow and to prosper. Jack Ruby certainly embodied the fact that the Mafia and its violent cohorts were repeatedly provided the opportunity to break the law without consequence. If common criminals and thugs like Jack Ruby were not in jail, it is ultimately due to Warren Report-style deceptions which perverted justice by ignoring the significance of simple facts like Ruby's obvious Mafia connections. Despite Hoover's fraudulent denials, Jack Ruby's relationship with organized crime was the product of a lifelong commitment. Mob justice effectively defined the normal course of Ruby's affairs. In 1947, Ruby settled in Dallas, where friends like Mafia enforcer Paul Roland Jones helped him consolidate the interests of the mob and corruptible police officers. Jones was a convicted murderer who bragged about his coast to coast syndicate contacts. Since 1947, he and Ruby cultivated friendships with the Dallas Police at the behest of the Mafia, and Jack Ruby's strip clubs proved invaluable in the effort. Ruby reserved the best booze and the best girls for "his boys" and it was only a matter of time before the initial Mafia plan to corrupt the police began to pay dividends. As relationships developed, Ruby became an informant who provided the police with information about low-level vice and narcotics operations, and the Mafia with the opportunity to carve out an exclusive, competition-free territory. The "sweetheart" deals that Ruby deliberately cultivated are well documented. Former Dallas County Sheriff Steve Cuthrie indicated that as early as 1947, Jack Ruby was the designated frontman for Chicago mobsters who planned to control gambling and police payoffs.1 Luis Kutner, a Chicago attorney and a former staff lawyer for the Kefauver Committee that investigated organized crime in 1950, testified before the Warren Commission and indicated that Jack Ruby was "a syndicate lieutenant who had been sent to Dallas to serve as a liaison for Chicago mobsters."2 The fact that Jack Ruby was the payoff man for the Dallas Police is not subject to serious dispute. Ruby had evidently penetrated the payoff-riddled Dallas police, and experts who are well acquainted with the power structure that organized crime develops describe Ruby's links in the following terms: Most simply think that, say, a gambler exchanges money to the cop in return for protection of his interests. And that's as far as the relationship goes. Really, it goes one step further. The criminal will also give the policeman information about his underworld competitors. The cop goes out and busts them, allowing his illicit source of income to develop nothing less than a 'privileged sanctuary.' With all these other arrests under his belt, the cop compiles a respected reputation while his other relationships grow.3 There is nothing about Jack Ruby's life that does not tie him to the world of political corruption and organized crime. Friends like Mafia enforcers Paul Roland Jones and Dave Yaras certainly illustrated the measurable benefits of corrupt political influence. In 1931, Jones murdered a state witness in Kansas, received a life sentence, but resumed his criminal career after Governor Husman pardoned him. Ruby associate Dave Yaras, also a well known killer who planned and executed murder contracts for the Mob, shared the habit of murdering witnesses who were in a position to testify against him. Ruby's friends had made a career out of getting away with murder, and that probably summoned the necessary gumption required to execute the boldest assignment imaginable -to murder Lee Harvey Oswald on national television. The "traceless" assassination of John F. Kennedy was too meticulously planned to believe that the publicly televised murder of Lee Harvey Oswald was anything more than a desperate, last minute improvisation. Oswald was certainly targeted for murder, but the likely scenario is that he was supposed to be killed in a scuffle with a Dallas Police Officer who struggled to apprehend Kennedy's alleged assassin. The hunt for Oswald produced a number of close calls where it looked like Oswald, save for unintended consequences, would have been permanently silenced by the Dallas Police. One well publicized incident occurred in the Texas School Book Depository, where Oswald faced the loaded gun of a Dallas Police Officer but was released as soon as the manager of the Book Depository confronted the Officer. The post-assassination hunt for Oswald was relentless. About 30 minutes after the assassination, a police car stopped in front of Oswald's house, and it has been suggested that Assistant D.A. William Alexander, a Right Wing extremist who was in on the arrest of Oswald at the Texas School Book Depository, was stalking the patsy. Shortly before Oswald was arrested, Alexander and a group of policemen were in the alley behind the theatre, and "it was believed that someone intended to murder Oswald, but was foiled when Oswald didn't run out of the theatre."4 In the light of the failed plot to silence Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, the liaison between the Mafia and the Dallas Police, assumed the task to murder Kennedy's alleged assassin on national television, by default. According to the Warren Report, Jack Ruby was friendly with about 25-50 policemen. According to reliable sources, Ruby knew more than half of the 1200 men on the Dallas Police. Indeed, out of "the 75 or so policemen who were present when Oswald was killed, at least 40 knew Ruby."5 And once again, the implicit fact that is ultimately exposed is that the Kennedy assassination cover up was so ruthlessly and violently maintained, that no cost or effort was spared, to keep the truth buried. When Jack Ruby murdered Oswald, Hoover pompously blamed the media, instead of the corruption that produced Jack Ruby. According to the Warren Report: "The Commission believes that the news media, as well as the police authorities, who failed to impose conditions more in keeping with the orderly process of justice, must share responsibility for the failure of law enforcement which occurred in connection with the death of Oswald"6 At the same time, the reputation of J.Edgar Hoover was bathed in infallibility. According to the Warren Report, "concerned that there might be an attempt on Oswald's life, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover sent a message to Chief Curry on November 22 through Special Agent Manning C. Clements of the FBI's Dallas office, urging that Oswald be afforded the utmost security. Curry does not recall receiving the message."7 Despite the rhetoric, Hoover never demonstrated a single concern, besides the absolute zeal to cover up the truth about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Since the arrest of Jack Ruby, Hoover's obsession to maintain the cover up was so absolute, that Jack Ruby was not even allowed to make a phone-call which was not monitored by the FBI. Indeed, "the FBI was supplying Ruby with small change for use in the phone, to encourage his indiscriminate placement of carefully monitored calls."8 Jack Ruby certainly acknowledged the excessive secrecy and the ruthlessness which was dominating events when he said: "Everything pertaining to what's happening has never come to the surface. The world will never know the true facts of what occurred [or] my motive... The people [who] have so much to gain and had such an ulterior motive to put me in the position I am in.. will never let the true facts [be known] to the world."9 But Mafia ally and patriot Johnny Roselli ultimately exposed the "true facts" when he threw caution to the wind and said, "Ruby was one of our boys. He was ordered by the Mafia to kill Oswald." The world of Jack Ruby, Hoover's FBI and the Mafia came together in the 1950's when mutual interest over Cuba had made them solid allies. In 1959, when covert, anti-Castro operations were flourishing and gun-running campaigns to arm a popular counter-revolution were supported by Mafia and American intelligence operatives, Jack Ruby travelled to and from Cuba, and if he didn't have State Department approval, why was he not arrested? The revolution in Cuba had undermined Havana's status as the world capital of organized crime and the Mafia actively pursued its interests by supporting a counter-revolution. Mafia gophers like Jack Ruby did the leg work, Mafia bosses like Carlos Marcello provided unaccountable financial support and FBI agents who illegally engaged the anti-Castro crusade, reported directly to J. Edgar Hoover. The fact that Ruby's known liaison with the FBI was interlocked by several illegal trips strongly indicates that the covert relationship that Ruby shared with Mafia gunrunners and Hoover's FBI was very significant and involved. Jack Ruby was a contact who embraced the anti-Communist crusade in Cuba, and that certainly made him a highly valued, FBI informant, as long as J. Edgar Hoover was the Director. Hoover claimed that Ruby's liaison with the FBI ended in October of 1959, but that is simply another indication of Hoover's common propensity to deceive. Clearly, anti-Communist informants like Jack Ruby were not casually dismissed. The duration of the relationship between Hoover's FBI and Jack Ruby was determined by the overlap of their intensive anti-Communist interests, not by Hoover's commonplace, fraudulent denials. Individual FBI agents generally attest to what was evidently a substantial, long-term relationship between Jack Ruby and Hoover's FBI because, in their own words, "no FBI agent would meet a potential informant nine (known) times unless he was getting positive results."10 Ruby's illegal trips to Cuba continued through to January 1963, and the suggestion that Hoover's FBI abruptly cut-off relations is absurd. Hoover may have exploited the fact that American activity which related to Cuba was primarily covert, illegal and unrecorded, but time has provided the opportunity to unearth obvious lies and to restore the truth. In particular, Jack Ruby and Hoover's FBI were Cold War allies prior to the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and cover up co-conspirators, since Lee Harvey Oswald was deliberately selected to assume the blame. Like Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby was an ideal selection. As a mob envoy who smuggled guns to Cuba, Ruby's activity complimented Hoover's anti-Communist crusade, and Hoover's FBI carefully monitored every single move that Jack Ruby made. Hoover's contention that Jack Ruby was a short-term, casual FBI informant, is nothing more than a transparent fraud. Covert, American intelligence operatives supported illegal gun-running to Cuba, and the "patriotic bond" between mobsters and intelligence agencies were in fact responsible for hatching illegal, covert schemes like the well publicized CIA/Mafia plots to murder Castro. Clearly, the anti-Castro crusade was an obsession that preoccupied J. Edgar Hoover and the Mafia even more than it did the CIA. Indeed, it was Mafia Mogul Meyer Lansky who initially "indicated to the CIA that some of his people who were still on the island, or those who were just going back, might assassinate Castro."11 With hundreds of Cubans at his disposal, Lansky believed that he could easily recruit a couple of gunmen to assassinate Castro. As far as Lansky was concerned, Cubans who were trained to work in Mafia-controlled hotels were just itching for the opportunity to orchestrate a Batista comeback and to recover their lost jobs. Lansky used every single political contact he had to convince the CIA that the time was ripe for a Cuban counter-revolution, but his pleas were overwhelmingly ignored. "He tried hard to persuade the CIA agents that he could have Fidel removed, and he told them that he was quite prepared to finance the operation himself. But Meyer got no encouragement from them, and he was very depressed when they said there was no possibility of anyone giving him the go-ahead for such a plan."12 Eventually, the CIA allegedly grew into Lansky's frame of mind, but the initial enthusiasts were zealous, anti-Communist and pro-gambling crusaders. Lansky initially collected the sympathetic support of relative unknowns like Dana C. Smith, a gambler who "had been with a group of men, including Richard Nixon, who flew from Miami to Havana in the early 1950's."13 As Lansky's ideas circulated, they ultimately developed into the so-called CIA/Mafia plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. In the meantime, Meyer Lansky, financial wizard to the Mafia, publicly boasted that the enterprise he represented was bigger than U.S. steel. Ordinarily, the law usually catches up to people who openly boast about their criminal enterprises. Corrupt law enforcement officials like J. Edgar Hoover however actively protected the interests of valuable allies in the war against Communism and Lansky was essentially immune to criminal prosecution. Indeed, given sufficient will, the FBI could have easily indicted and convicted Meyer Lansky. Having intercepted intelligence which was substantive enough to unquestionably place "Meyer Lansky in the United States underworld", the FBI was well positioned to prosecute. FBI evidence against Lansky was so detailed and conclusive that taped conversations had actually disclosed the undeniable fact that Lansky was the recipient of money skimmed-off from Las Vegas casinos.14 But instead of prosecuting Lansky, Hoover cleverly granted him immunity through the legal footnote: "The evidence uncovered by these wire intercepts was all collected without court authorization and thus is inadmissible in American courts."15 Ironically, the very same FBI reports that recorded Lansky's criminal activity simultaneously granted Lansky immunity from prosecution. The double irony of course, is that J. Edgar Hoover, the accomplished con artist who routinely violated the law, used the law to protect the interests of the Mafia. And so, despite irrefutable evidence to the contrary, J. Edgar Hoover publicly claimed that Mafia Moguls like Meyer Lansky did not exist. In retrospect, the only logic of the absurd determination to deny the obvious is that Lansky and Hoover were allies in the secret war to destroy Communism in Cuba, and Hoover could simply not expose the Mafia without betraying his own, criminal culpability. Historians have ignored the implications of the fact that J. Edgar Hoover and Meyer Lansky were secret allies in the war to destroy Communism. The corruption that these relationships spawned are responsible for criminals like former FBI agent Gordon Liddy, who implicitly exposed the fact that the excuse for not prosecuting Lansky was entirely disingenuous, when he indicated that Hoover's FBI never went by the "book", even though it always created the impression that it did. In Liddy's own words: The underlying theme in all our courses on law investigation and forensic science was always to appear to go by the "book," the manual of rules and regulations, and to be able to document that appearance. Without being stated in so many words, however, the message to new agents was clear; the Bureau expected us to one primary "do" and one overriding "don't": Do succeed; get the job done. To this end we were always to "dominate the situation" and use our "initiative and resourcefulness."16 Clearly, if Hoover had any intention beyond protecting Meyer Lansky, the FBI had more than enough knowledge and resources to "get the job done". But the evident alliance between Lansky, New York gangster, Frank Costello and Hoover goes back to at least the 1930's when Lansky and Costello dominated the illegal off-track betting market and gamblers like Hoover used their services. Seymour Pollock, a former Lansky associate exposed their relationship when he said: He [Hoover] used to place bets through Billingsley [night club owner] and or Winchell [newspaperman that Hoover could rely upon to spread his propaganda], and he had one or two others. And they were not two dollar bets! They ran into the hundreds and into the thousands. Pollock raises his voice in obvious disdain over Hoover's transparent gimmick to allow himself to be photographed placing bets at the two dollar booth whenever he went to the track. Louis Rosensteil, a millionaire philanthropist who had links to Costello and Lansky, was also a middleman who placed bets for Hoover. Rosensteil's wife, Susan, described the sweetheart deal that Hoover enjoyed when she said: Hoover would like to gamble... Hoover would place the bets through Rosensteil. Rosensteil would call the boys up and they would make the bets. And if Hoover won he got paid and if he didn't win they would just forget it. Is it any wonder that "the boys" never had to worry about Hoover and that they brazenly bragged about their financial conquests? With Hoover on the payroll, there was little need to be cautious, because as long as the Director of the FBI denied their existence and documented their operations for the sake of granting them prosecutorial immunity, the Mafia flourished. According to well publicized disclosure, the "contract coordinator" of the plot to assassinate Castro was former FBI agent Robert Maheau. Maheau himself certainly sponsors the popular myth. In his own words: ... I recruited mob figures Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana for an extremely hush-hush CIA plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, his brother Raul, and his closest associate, Che Guevara. Hoover wanted to debrief me about what I might have learned concerning Johnny and Sam's "business ventures." I turned him down flat. The work we did on the CIA plot was classified, and unless the Company instructed me otherwise, I wasn't even going to admit it had happened, let alone blab about conversations that occurred in the course of it. Needless to say, my position did not please Hoover. In fact, he became extremely annoyed.17 Who does Maheau think he is kidding? Hoover did not need Maheau to debrief him about Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli, -he had direct contact. It is J. Edgar Hoover who protected and had the capacity to co-ordinate a joint operation between the Mafia and American intelligence, not Robert Maheau. At any rate, Maheau, who calls himself one of the last people to know the truth about the Castro plots, betrays the fact that while he is willing to promote the popular CIA/Mafia cover story, he will not divulge the truth. In his own words: There's one thing that I can say for sure about the Bay of Pigs and the plot to assassinate Fidel Castro: I wish to God I'd never been involved in it. It was the right choice at the time... but the wrong choice looking back. Jack Anderson and I and everyone else can sit around all day and come up with theories about what happened. Problem is -we'll never know for sure. The truth is buried in a lot of graves.18 Satisfied by his perception that the truth will never come out, Maheau coyly hints about where the truth is buried when he says: "I'm one of the last people left who know what really went on during the operation to assassinate Fidel Castro. A lot of the people involved died pretty suddenly. Maybe just a coincidence... maybe not. Roselli was hit in 1976."19 Secure in his capacity to deceive, Maheau evidently believes that the historical record is subject to his evasiveness. But the very same determination to keep the truth buried reflects the ugly, regrettable secrets that Maheau coyly dances around. In retrospect Robert Maheau was absolutely nothing, beyond J. Edgar Hoover's gopher. The well publicized claim that he was Hughes' right hand man was simply a cover to conceal the fact that the real force behind Howard Hughes was J. Edgar Hoover and the Mafia. Clearly, without their cooperation Howard Hughes would not have been able to "take over" Las Vegas. In the final analysis, it wasn't a takeover, just a smooth transfer of funds which gave the intelligence community a better cover through the mysterious Howard Hughes. In the process, Robert Maheau was nothing but a "foot soldier." As an agent in Hoover's FBI, Maheau developed admiration for the complex world of lies and deceit because the "patriots" who played the game "believed in something" and "no matter what it was", Maheau found that to be "refreshing". Maheau's description of the strange world that Hoover's FBI introduced him to reflects the environment that conditioned him. In his own words: The clandestine world of double and triple agents is a landscape where lies are so complex that truth disappears, shrouded in a fog of vague motives and uncertain loyalties. It is a place without honour, without morality, without trust. 20 The so-called CIA/Mafia plots were never supposed to be disclosed, they were supposed to forever lie in the sort of environment that Maheau found intriguing -where truth disappears. And so, the question that needs to be examined is why were they ever exposed? And the answer leads directly to the person in the best position to expose the truth -the one and only J. Edgar Hoover. It is Hoover who used allegations about Castro assassination plots to protect the Mafia from imminent prosecution in 1962 and to divert attention away from the truth about the Kennedy assassination in 1967. The so-called CIA/Mafia plots were first brought to the attention of Robert Kennedy in the context that the liaison between the CIA and the Mafia had terminated. Allegedly hatched by the Eisenhower administration, the question of who initially authorized plans to murder Castro has yet to be disclosed, but given all the available evidence to date, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon and the Mafia are evidently primary architects. The plot to murder Castro was an integral part of the Bay of Pigs operation, and speaking about the invasion project in 1964, Nixon said, "I had been the strongest and most persistent advocate for setting up and supporting such a program." 21 Philip Bonsal, American ambassador to Cuba in 1959 called Nixon the "father of the operation".22 According to Howard Hunt, Brigadier General Robert Cushman told him that Nixon was "the project's action officer in the White House".23 Indeed, Richard Nixon was so heavily involved in plans to murder leftists in Cuba that he had even selected Castro's successor, Mario Kohly Jr., the son of a right-wing Cuban exile. Richard Nixon and the elder Kohly had evidently agreed to plan "for the elimination of Miro Cardona and all the leftist Cuban Revolutionary Front leaders in order that Kohly could immediately take over the reigns of power in Cuba, once a successful invasion of exiles being trained by the CIA had been accomplished... [Manuel] Artime [commander of the Cuban Brigade] and his followers were to be assassinated by [Kohly's] forces once a successful landing had been accomplished."24 When Lyndon Johnson wanted to divert attention away from the truth about the Kennedy assassination, he promoted the sensational allegation that John F. Kennedy was running a "murder incorporated in the Caribbean", but the evidence strongly suggests that his good friends J. Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon, were actually in charge of that department. Indeed, Richard Nixon himself evidently confirms his relationship with the Kohlys. When the elder Kohly was indicted and convicted for conspiring to counterfeit Cuban pesos, Nixon wrote to Judge Weinfeld and asked him to suspend or reduce his sentence on the grounds that "the patriotism, courage and energy of the exiles in attempting to mount a counterrevolution have been in the past, and may in the future again be regarded as advantageous to the interests of the United States."25 Richard Nixon was obviously in the habit of using Cuban exiles to advance his interests. On June 17, 1972, five men, including Cuban exiles, were arrested for breaking into the Watergate office building headquarters of the Democratic Party's national committee. It was obviously not an isolated occurrence, and the question that needs to be asked is: What other covert, so-called national interest operations did Nixon, his Cuban friends and his intelligence contacts engage between 1959 and 1994? Given Nixon's constant meddling in American foreign policy interests and his absolute refusal to learn from what most people see as his mistakes, one has to be extremely gullible to believe that Nixon ever severed his habit to engage covert intelligence operations. Indeed, a careful analysis of Richard Nixon's meddlesome, "national security" operations betrays an almost uninterrupted, 35 year-long history of covert operations, most of which have never been exposed. If one includes his 1940's foray, then Nixon shares the responsibility for half a century of illegal, political meddling, specifically geared towards the determination to destroy the influence of his political enemies. Perhaps Nixon's known partners in crime reflect the scope and the nature of the plots he engaged. Cronies like former FBI/CIA personnel Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt, were certainly prepared to violate every known law, in the name of the national security. Half a century of deception leaves a lot that needs to be unravelled, and one can more or less safely assume that most of the official record is tainted by the pressure to cover up the truth. For example, the disinformation that Hoover deliberately promoted when he highlighted CIA/Mafia involvement made it extremely more difficult to determine the entire truth about the Castro assassination plots. According to public disclosure, Hoover was officially "in the dark", but as early as October 18 1960, Hoover was evidently so well versed about assassination plots against Castro that information flowed from the office of the Director of the FBI, to the CIA and not the other way around. Eisenhower was still the President and Nixon was the Vice President who was heavily involved in planning Bay of Pigs-style plots when J. Edgar Hoover wrote the following memorandum to Richard Bissell of the CIA. ... during recent conversations with several friends, Giancana stated that Fidel Castro was to be done away with very shortly. When doubt was expressed regarding this statement, Giancana reportedly assured those present that Castro's assassination would occur in November. Moreover, he allegedly indicated that he had already met with the assassin-to-be on three occasions... Giancana claimed that everything has been perfected for the Killing of Castro, and that the "assassin" had arranged... to drop a "pill" in some drink or food of Castro's.26 J. Edgar Hoover obviously did not need the CIA or Robert Maheau to debrief him about Castro assassination plots. Common interest allies like Richard Nixon and Sam Giancana placed J. Edgar Hoover in a position where he was in on the planning from the very beginning, he did not need to rely upon secondary sources for information about an anti-communist crusade. In fact, Hoover himself disclosed the so-called CIA/Mafia plots, not because he wished to betray covert operations but because Hoover's friends, Sam Giancana and Robert Maheau were subject to criminal prosecution over an illegal wiretap they had planted and J. Edgar Hoover developed a gimmick to grant them immunity. He couldn't very well say that they were engaged in a sensitive operation against Castro through the FBI -that was illegal, so he simply used his CIA contacts because that was the only option which addressed the need to promote an allegation without betraying his own criminal culpability. The first effort to protect his friends from criminal prosecution culminated in the circulation of an FBI memo about the "CIA's clandestine efforts against the Castro government".27 Robert Kennedy didn't know what Hoover was talking about and asked for a follow-up. The twin effort to simultaneously prosecute and to immunize Maheau and Giancana reflected the divided nature of the Kennedy Justice Department. On the one hand, Robert Kennedy had declared war against organized crime and on the other, J. Edgar Hoover granted Mafia patriots prosecutorial immunity. In April of 1962, the effort to immunize Hoover's Mafia allies created the impetus to promote vague CIA allegations which suggested that Giancana should be spared prosecution because he was a party to the "CIA's clandestine efforts against the Castro government". Kennedy demanded elaboration and the CIA added that the prosecution of Giancana "would lead to exposure of most sensitive information relating to the abortive Cuban invasion in April 1961."28 Vague allegations did not impress Kennedy and the effort to prosecute Giancana persisted. Finally, on May 7, 1962, Lawrence Houston, general counsel to the CIA told Kennedy that the CIA had recruited Giancana to murder Castro and that the Las Vegas prosecution threatened to expose national security secrets. The fact that the government had cooperated with his enemies infuriated and embarrassed Attorney General Robert Kennedy. Master blackmailer J. Edgar Hoover pretended to share the concern that a prosecution had been compromised, even though he had orchestrated the entire campaign to protect his Mafia allies. Incidentally, when Nixon became President, he sought to duplicate the tactic that Hoover used to protect Giancana from prosecution in effort to weasel out of the Watergate scandal. But the deceitful practise of having the CIA call the Justice Department to cover up illegalities, failed to protect Nixon presidency. The fact that Czar Hoover was the original intermediary between the Mafia and the government, betrays anti-Castro, Cold War secrecy. Mobsters like Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana relied upon the fact that they had cultivated relations with corrupt law enforcement officials like Hoover, they did not kow tow before Cold War pawns like Robert Maheau. In the final analysis, it is not possible to understand the significance of the plots to assassinate Castro without a careful study of the individuals involved. The common practise of seeking to unravel the truth by focusing on an individual agency like the CIA is an exceedingly futile process. The covert initiators and volunteers of anti-Castro assassination plots were recruited on an individual basis, and anti-communist fanatics, J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, Sam Giancana, Johnny Roselli, Frank Sturgis, Howard Hunt, Robert Maheau and the like, were directly involved. Indeed, even John McCone, the Director of the CIA did not know a thing about the CIA/Mafia plots to assassinate Castro until he read about it in the Chicago Sun-Times.29In retrospect, the comical unfolding of the so-called CIA/Mafia plot disclosures reflect Hoover's desperate efforts to protect the Mafia from prosecution. The following grotesque memo clearly illustrates Hoover's obsessive campaign to protect gangsters through fraud, manipulation, deceit and even attempted blackmail. The memo speaks for itself: Colonel Edwards [Maheau's contact in the CIA] had objected to prosecutions in the Las Vegas case.. .and. . during the FBI investigations of Roselli's role in the matter, the Bureau had found that she [Judith Campbell Exner] had also been having affairs with Sam Giancana and President Kennedy -simultaneously. Hoover had cross-checked the allegation by reviewing the woman's phone records, which showed that calls had been made to the general White House number.30 Despite Hoover's best efforts, the attempt to blackmail the Kennedys failed. The Kennedy Justice Department refused to abandon the effort to prosecute Maheau and Giancana on the strength of Hoover's bullshit, and even after Hoover managed to get the CIA involved in the controversy, the Kennedys still resisted and continued to keep Sam Giancana under heavy surveillance. Moreover, in light of the fact that the birth of the allegation that Kennedy was having an affair with Judith Campbell is linked to Hoover's fraudulent efforts to secure prosecutorial immunity for his Mafia friends, it is safe to assume that the allegations themselves are equally fraudulent. Indeed, Judith Campbell herself denied the probity of the laughable love triangle [plus Kennedy] allegations, which she ultimately embraced in a vain effort to restore the credibility of Hoover's fraudulent files. Perhaps, if Judith Campbell herself was not a frustrated, self-admitted perjurer who was singularly obsessed by the determination to impugn the credibility of her enemies, her testimony could have been used to flesh out the historical record. In the meantime, propaganda is identified and rejected. In particular, Kennedy's enemies routinely promoted a delusional, self-serving record of gross, historical distortions. Robert Maheau, for example, the "patriot" and Mafia associate who traded the capacity to reason for self-serving delusions, actually claimed that John F. Kennedy was a certifiable murderer because he refused to use the American military to invade Cuba during the aborted Bay of Pigs invasion. Seeking to enlighten the committee that was investigating intelligence agencies in the 1970's, Maheau proudly acknowledged his ignorance and paranoia when he said, "Senator, I find it difficult to understand all the time and money that is being spent to determine if our country plotted to murder a foreign leader -a murder that never took place -when there is no evidence that any time and money is being spent to turn the spotlight on the murders that in fact did take place."31 Maheau further "enlightened" the committee he "startled" when he said: "The murders I mean were the boys killed during the botched Bay of Pigs invasion." In a further elaboration, Maheau said, "...as our volunteers attempted to land or actually did land on the beaches, they were destroyed by Russian hardware that we should have destroyed according to the plan. And that, gentlemen, is murder."32 The nonsense that Maheau promotes is akin to the expectation that John F. Kennedy should have prosecuted the Bay of Pigs expedition in accordance to secret schemes that were typically engineered by zealots like J.Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon -secret schemes that Kennedy did not even know about. Talk about expecting the impossible... If, as Maheau seems to believe that Kennedy was a murderer, did he also deserve to be murdered? In the world of Robert Maheau, any transient, elected official like Kennedy, was expendable. Maheau made that point quite obvious when he said, "Presidents come and go, but the agencies that serve them -be it the FBI, the CIA, the IRS, or any other -continue far beyond any one administration."33 Arthur M. Schlesinger succinctly describes the affliction that Maheau evidently suffered when he said: Intelligence agencies, sealed off by walls of secrecy from the rest of the community, tend to form societies of their own. Prolonged immersion in the self-contained, self-justifying, ultimately hallucinatory world of clandestinity and deception erodes the reality principle. So intelligence operatives, in the CIA as well as the FBI, had begun to see themselves as the appointed guardians of the Republic infinitely more devoted and knowledgeable than transient elected officials, morally authorized to do on their own whatever they believed the nation's security demanded. Let others interfere at their peril.34 Given this distorted sense of reality that Maheau and the like shared, the murder of John F. Kennedy was not even considered to be a murder -it was an act motivated out of the need to preserve American institutions. As bizarre as it sounds, Maheau made his strange mind-set crystal clear when he said: "We cannot destroy our cathedrals just because our stained-glass window might need repair."35 Accordingly, it was only proper for Kennedy, the "stained-glass window" that needed repair, to be replaced. It would have been difficult not to laugh, had the consequences of their ignorance been less tragic. Maheau was a product of the bizarre world that J. Edgar Hoover controlled -a world that directed hostility towards earnest officials who upheld the law, and extended benefit to criminals who supported a perverted vision of the national security. The fact that the Mafia was a direct beneficiary of Hoover's sense of "patriotism" is certainly very clear. In 1958, a report on organized crime was circulated to law enforcement officials within the government, but "the day after they were circulated, J. Edgar Hoover had each copy recalled and destroyed."36 Hoover routinely impeded the efforts of his own agents to protect his organized crime interests and made it practically impossible for his agents to successfully prosecute known Mafia bosses. And while the press periodically promoted hints of the evident relationship between Hoover and the Mafia, it was never able to prove anything. In 1975, for example, two years after Hoover's death, when the New York Times reported that between 1960 and 1971, Hoover's FBI used the Mafia to harass the American Communist Party, the analysis was extremely superficial.37 According to the press disclosure, the relationship between organized crime and Hoover's FBI was limited to a misinformation campaign that involved writing bogus letters and anonymous allegations designed to discredit Communists and Subversives. But Hoover and the Mafia exploited available resources to the fullest possible degree, they did not share a casual acquaintance. Indeed, like the Mafia, Hoover's major preoccupation related to the task of developing schemes to override legal restraints. Even the restrictive legal mandate which forbade Hoover the power to combat communism outside of the United States, was ignored by the Director of the FBI. Having secretly installed FBI agents in at least twenty foreign countries, Hoover circumvented the fact that intelligence-gathering abroad was a CIA responsibility and the master spook effectively penetrated what was supposed to be CIA territory. Obsessed by the belief that America's primary responsibility was to mobilize every single resource in the effort to oblitera te Communism, Hoover developed and promoted a concept of legality which was strictly linked to his peculiar view of the national security. Clearly, as far as Hoover was concerned, the law had absolutely nothing to do with the measure of anything. William Sullivan, the former FBI official who was evidently more candid than most, offers a glimpse into the mind-set that motivated Hoover. According to Sullivan: The things he [Hoover] hated, he hated all his life. He didn't vacillate any. He hated liberalism, he hated blacks, he hated Jews-he had this great long list of hates. Anybody that had any liberal views was persona non grata. He called them pseudo liberals, but he pronounced it "swaydo". It was always "swaydo", and nobody dared to correct his pronunciation. As far as he was concerned, there was never a real, genuine, sincere liberal or intellectual.38 Unlike most FBI officials who were eternally loyal to J. Edgar Hoover, Sullivan became an outspoken critic who condemned the hatred and the extreme abuse of power that Hoover practised, and that placed him in direct confrontation with FBI officials like John Mohr who maintained the impenetrable wall of silence. According to Sullivan: --[cont]-- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! 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