-Caveat Lector-
http://newtimes.rway.com/1996/112096/cover.htm
-----
Cover Story
Sex, Drugs & JFK
Historian Peter Dale Scott traces underworld connections to 1963
assassination
The New Times Interview By Russ Tarby
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Our most nagging national nightmare unfolded on an otherwise glorious autumn
afternoon. After a misty morning in Dallas, the sun finally emerged on Nov.
22, 1963, its warm rays belying the darkness that enveloped Dealey Plaza as
John Fitzgerald Kennedy's presidential motorcade approached.
After 33 years, two federal investigations, scores of conspiracy conferences,
some 2,500 books and several films, the darkness still dominates.
For many Americans, the myth of Camelot casts a rosy pallor over the grim
realities of the early 1960s. Renegade historian Peter Dale Scott, however,
refuses to perpetuate myths. He applies a unique, behind-the-scenes
approach--a probe into what he calls "deep politics"--to shed new light on
the myriad forces that combined to commit and cover up the Crime of the
Century. Scott, a poet and professor of English at the University of
California in Berkeley, has emerged as the world's foremost expert on the
political context of the JFK assassination.
A former Canadian diplomat with a Ph.D. in political science, Scott began
studying the president's murder in 1969. While researching a book on the
Vietnam War (The War Conspiracy, Bobbs Merrill, New York, 1972), he
discovered a crucial shift in U.S. war policy followed within 48 hours of
Kennedy's killing. Although controversial at the time, Scott's analysis of
the war's escalation was recently verified by the published memoirs of JFK
Defense Secretary Robert McNamara.
Standing head and shoulders above your stereotypical conspiracy theorists,
the 67-year-old author exemplifies a new breed of Warren Commission critics.
He's not the type who sees gun-toting badmen lurking in the bushes in
snapshots of the Grassy Knoll. He doesn't bother much with the obvious
inconsistencies of the Magic Bullet Theory or the botched autopsy evidence.
Instead, Scott immerses himself--and readers of his current paperback Deep
Politics and the Death of JFK (University of California Press, Berkeley, 413
pages, $14.95)--in the netherworld where organized crime and government join
forces to achieve common goals. With pit bull tenacity, Scott doggedly chases
documents hidden away in Washington and elsewhere to follow the movements of
military intelligence, the FBI and the CIA as these officials interface with
foreign operatives and domestic insurgents alike.
He may not analyze the trajectory of the bullets that hailed down on the
president's Lincoln convertible that day, but he does analyze the
intelligence backgrounds of each Dallas Police officer riding in the
motorcade's lead automobile. He does delve deeply into Jack Ruby's checkered
career and his connections to the police, to the Mafia, to corruspt labor
unions, and to wealthy Texas businessmen. He does analyze a century's worth
of drug smuggling, gun-running and corruption in Central America's banana
republics. He knows who was trafficking heroin and who was running the big
craps games in Texas. He knows who was sharing the booty--and inside
information--with local cops and federal investigators. And he knows who was
sleeping with who, who was wiretapping who and who was blackmailing who.
"One of the most under-reported political topics is the extent to which
prostitution in Washington has been the key to ongoing corruption and scandal
in that city," he writes in Deep Politics. And, using meticulous scholarship
and dozens of first-hand sources, he discusses the women that the Mafia
supplied to the Kennedy brothers, and how the mob and FBI Director J. Edgar
Hoover wiretapped those sexual liaisons for extortion purposes.
Such topics, rarely considered by conventional historians, are the essence of
Scott's deep political analysis. "I define deep politics as all those
political practices and arrangements, deliberate or not, which are usually
repressed rather than acknowledged," he writes. "Sometimes the secret is an
open one, as when a particular city knows that its cops are on the take, or a
nation knows that its parties have completely thwarted the intentions of
campaign-financing laws. But some secrets are more closely held."
Such as the secrets surrounding the JFK hit.
Ever since 1979, when the House Select Committee on Assassinations reported
JFK was probably killed as a result of a conspiracy, many writers have
explored the alliance between Mafia leaders and the CIA in a plot to murder
Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. But Scott goes much further, tracing the mob's
government ties back to World War II's "Operation Underworld," which evolved
into a government-protected narcotics business overseen by people such as
Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky. And he goes even further in Lee Harvey
Oswald's hometown of New Orleans, tracing the nefarious activities of that
city's fruit conglomerates, dockworkers unions and Mafiosi all the way back
to the 1880s.
Scott's analysis of the corruption of Central America by U.S. fruit companies
and the CIA led him to co-write a book with San Francisco Chronicle
journalist Jonathan Marshall about more recent government-protected drug
dealing. Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies and the CIA in Central America
(1991, University of California Press), was cited as a primary source for the
San Jose Mercury's August 1996 expose of how the CIA funded Nicaraguan Contra
rebels by allowing cocaine traffickers to operate in California cities. That
story then became a hot topic on the Internet, and the revelations inflamed
the African-American community, which has long suspected government
acquiescence in the proliferation of freebase cocaine in the country's inner
cities.
At the Fourth Decade Conference on the JFK assassination, staged at SUNY
Fredonia in July just before the CIA/cocaine story hit the mainstream media,
Scott delivered the keynote speech, discussing many avenues of research on
the president's murder. One of those dark avenues converges with the
CIA/cocaine/Contra conspiracy. Scott focused on newly released documents from
the Assassination Records Review Board detailing surveillance of Oswald's
alleged trip to Mexico City in late September 1963. Mexico's secret police
worked for the CIA by spying on people who made contact with the Cuban and
Soviet consulates in Mexico City in 1963, and they also played key roles in
drug smuggling during the 1970s and '80s.
Peter Dale Scott spoke at length with The New Times about his wide-ranging
research into our nation's deep politics. Here are some of his insights.
Q According to your research, the Mexican secret police played crucial
roles in both Oswald's alleged trip to Mexico in late September 1963 and in
the CIA/cocaine conspiracy os the 1980s. What's the connection?
A: The secret police in Mexico, from World War II to 1985 were called the
Direcion Federal de Seguridad (DFS), the Federal Directorate of Security.
With respect to the drug problem, by the 1980s the DFS was in effect taxing,
regulating and almost administrating the drug traffic in Mexico. The DFS
chief had successfully persuaded the major traffickers to relocate to
Guadalajara, and that became the so-called Guadalajara Cartel, enjoying a
good relationship to the CIA because they were giving money to the
{Nicaraguan} Contras and apparently even training Contras in Mexico.
The DFS had CIA guidance. Since the late 1940s, all of the DFS chiefs were
CIA assets. {In the early 1980s,} DFS head Miguel Nazar Haro was about to be
indicted in San Diego as part of the largest stolen car ring in North
America--more than 4,000 hot autos moving across the border from the U.S.
into Mexico--but the CIA intervened, saying, "You mustn't indict this man
because he's our most important asset in Mexico and one of our most important
in Latin America."
That encapsulates the problem we've had with drugs, and also gives us serious
insight into what happened in the Kennedy assassination.
All the drug traffickers in Mexico operated with impunity because they all
carried little DFS passes, prompting someone in the DEA to say that having a
DFS pass was virtually a license to traffic in Mexico. The name DFS is
gone--there were too many scandals in the 1980s--but the organization is
still there under another name and is suspected in several recent
assassinations in Mexico.
Q: What was the role of the DFS, the Mexican secret police, in the 1963
Kennedy assassination?
A: The DFS played a much more active role in generating the
information--some might say the disinformation--about Oswald's supposed visit
to Mexico in September-October 1963. Everyone said that the CIA monitored
Oswald's phone calls from the Cuban consulate, and the reality is
that--although the thing was set up by the CIA--the actually monitoring was
done by the DFS, as was the photography {of people entering and exiting the
consulate}. So we end up with a false phone call involving Lee Harvey Oswald
on Sept. 28. We also have photograph of somebody--an older, heavy set
man--who was identified as someone who called himself Oswald but clearly was
not our Oswald. I've been telling the Assassinations Records Review Board
(ARRB), which was established by the JFK Records Act, that they should push
hard on the Mexican government to release their records about the
assassination.
Q: What's your relationship with the Assassination Records Review Board
(ARRB). Will the board continue to function after its legislation runs out in
October 1997?
A: I'm grateful for whatever they release, and undeniably they have
released some interesting information. The CIA has released a great deal of
information itself. The problem is with agencies which haven't seen the light
and come clean--starting with the FBI and including the military--there
hasn't been any real progress there.
The style in Washington is not to rock the boat too much. It's quite clear
that with some agencies, we're not going to get the documents unless the
review board is quite adversarial and uses subpoena powers.
One of the big things they should do is take officers who participated in a
cover-up back in 1963 and interview those people, if necessary depose them
under oath and probably do it publicly in order to scare these people into
cooperating. But it's a lame duck board in a way, and I don't think they'll
act aggressively unless there is some outpouring of public opinion.
Q: In Deep Politics, you indicate that Chicago mobster Sam Giancana and
Jack Ruby--who was originally from Chicago--both were involved in drug
trafficking via Mexico.
A: There has been an important drug connection between Mexico and the city
of Chicago going back to the 1940s, when there was a very major opium and
heroin operation--now it's chiefly cocaine, but in those days it was chiefly
opium and heroin. Ruby was obviously involved in the major opium bust in
1947. The fact that the old Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) didn't go after
him suggests to me that he was probably an FBN informant. And in the 1950s, a
very good FBI informant told them that Jack Ruby was the person you had to
get the OK from to run drug deals from Mexico through Dallas.
Those two facts often go together: the informant is also the connection,
because an informant is in a position to say which deals will go through and
not be arrested. Those deals he doesn't approve of, he tells the police, and
there's an arrest. Three or four Dallas policemen have told us Ruby was their
informant on narcotics matters. We know he was. What has not been conceded,
but I think it's probably true, that he was an informant on the federal level
as well. Which would've made him quite an important guy.
Q: Who in Chicago was most interested in this Mexican drug connection?
A: The Mafia had mixed feelings about drugs--they seemed to feel it was
all right to deal drugs in foreign countries but maybe not here in the United
States. But Sam Giancana focused on international activities. He was very
active in Mexico, and eventually went to live in Mexico, where he spent most
of his last years before he came back and was killed in Chicago.
Giancana's sidekick, Richard Cain, travelled all over the world for him,
mostly setting up casinos. Now casinos and drugs go together. Couriers go
from casino to casino, they handle the drugs, and the money can be laundered
by being bet and lost on a roulette wheel. So it's a pretty common symbiosis,
whether it's Lebanon or Havana or Las Vegas.
Q: In Deep Politics you identify Tony Zoppi--who was Ruby's alibi for
12:30 in the afternoon on Nov. 22, 1963--as a major casino guy.
A: Well, he became a major casino guy. He was sort of one even at the
time, because {as a columnist for the Dallas Morning News}, he wrote about
what was going on in the nightclubs, so he was part of that milieu. He ended
up as an employee of a Las Vegas casino, in fact a notorious Chicago-owned
casino, the Riviera.
Q: Another casino operator was Jack Ruby's old buddy Lewis McWillie, who
was interviewed by the FBI two days before the assassination, something about
Giancana's secret ownership of a Lake Tahoe casino called the Cal/Neva Lodge.
A: McWillie--who'd previously worked at Meyer Lansky's Tropicana casino in
Havana--worked at the Cal/Neva Lodge in 1963, and we know that the FBI was
closing in on Giancana in 1963. And yes, he was interviewed by the FBI, in
Las Vegas, on Nov. 20, 1963, but we don't know enough about why they were
interviewing him. They did establish that he'd worked at the Cal/Neva, where
Marilyn Monroe often met with Giancana.
The House Assassinations Committee heard evidence that Ruby visited Las Vegas
in the weeks prior to the assassination, and if he did, it was certainly to
see McWillie, and it was also rumored he saw {Johnny} Rosselli at that time.
Q: In their book Double Cross, by Sam Giancana's relatives Sam and Chuck
Giancana, they depict the mobster hosting both Kennedy brothers for sex
parties in the cabins at the Cal/Neva Lodge sometime in 1960.
A: That's very probable. There was clearly a very strong link between the
Cal/Neva Lodge and old Joe Kennedy {the president's father}. He got his
Christmas tree every year from the Cal/Neva Lodge.
Q: The longer you look at the JFK hit, the more Ruby keeps popping up
everywhere. On the surface he seems a sleazy gangster wanna-be running a
strip show, but he turns out to be a central figure in the assassination.
A: I've always argued that Ruby was a much more important person. The
house committee admitted that, yes, he was a mob figure but he was a two-bit
punk or that sort of thing. But he was a police connection, and that's a very
important part of mob activity. The reason the mob's so powerful in Chicago
is they've always had someone like {master wiretapper} Richard Cain who was a
policeman, once head of investigations for the Sheriff of Cook County. In
other words, he was a senior law enforcement official, there but he was also
a made member of the mob and very close to Giancana. He was also a top, top
informant for William Roemer, who was the FBI's chief mob man in Chicago, and
Cain was one of Roemer's best friends.
A big disappointment for me was that the house committee totally
suppressed--and virtually lied--about Ruby's relationship to the Dallas
police. Especially as an informant, Ruby embodies that link between
government and crime.
Q: As the operator of the Carousel Club, Ruby obviously rubbed elbows with
B-girls and prostitutes. Deep Politics also depicts Ruby in some pretty
high-class company, perhaps running gambling operations and girls, for some
Texas oil men, and the Dallas-based Great Southwest Corporation.
A: One documented case, not mentioned in the book, centered on a Galveston
millionaire named Shearn Moody who was famous for holding huge sex parties at
his home, and this man's name was in Ruby's address book. So yeah, he
definitely knew at least some of these millionaires. Moody's family insurance
company, Gold America National Insurance, was in turn invested heavily in
Nevada casinos like the Sands. Ruby definitely knew him.
Q: Why would these big businessmen have anything to do with Jack Ruby?
A: Well, you know honest crap games--that's something the mob could offer.
Moving south was a very important event in mob history. One of the
justifications for the mob going into Dallas was that the local gambling was
fixed. Paul Roland Jones--who knew Ruby--went down there representing a
Chicago faction, and he offered people there honest gambling. In this sense,
organized crime becomes, you might say, the government of those aspects of
life which the official government is not allowed to recognize. Gambling is
illegal but you want it regulated, so it's regulated by organized crime.
Q: On the law enforcement side of things, J. Edgar Hoover kept what he
called his Personal and Confidential files, many of which were sexual in
nature. What do you know about those files?
A: They weren't just sexual. If he had known, for example, that, shall we
say, another American president had been involved in the John Kennedy
assassination, that would go into the Personal and Confidential files. It
doesn't have to be sexual; it's anything that's the highest level utility for
potential blackmail.
Q: How did Jack Kennedy's extra-marital sex life relate to the
assassination?
A: The mob's influence in Washington certainly is related to their
provision of sexual favors for all tendencies--boys for people who like boys,
girls for people who like girls. Kennedy was a notorious case. Undeniably
Kennedy became involved with a mistress of Sam Giancana, Judy Campbell. This
fact by itself would be important whether or not we believe the other things
she has added to her story since.
The Kennedy family--old Joe Kennedy--had been involved with the mob since the
days of Prohibition, and specifically with the Chicago mob. That were even
references to this in the Kefauver Commission. Legitimate Kennedy investments
were largely in Chicago. The Kennedys owned the Trade Mart in Chicago, which
was a very major investment. After Prohibition, Joe Kennedy had a liquor
distributing company along with a mob man named Joe Fusco. When John Kennedy
first ran for Congress in '46, Joe Kennedy did a smart thing--he sold off his
liquor interests so that he would not have these conspicuous mob connections
anymore.
We do not yet fully understand that whole dynamic whereby the mob helped
elect John Kennedy and then was very alienated by Robert Kennedy's
prosecution of the mob and Sam Giancana in particular.
RFK listed the mobsters he targeted, including Giancana and Santos
Trafficante and Carlos Marcello--these are all relevant people--exactly the
element of the mob that the CIA involved in plots against Castro after Robert
Kennedy published The Enemy Within in 1960, in which he names these people.
So there's a very complicated dance here which involves the Kennedys'
relationship to the mob, the CIA's relationship with the mob, and the CIA
getting more involved with the mob at a time when the Kennedys are distancing
themselves from at least some elements of the mob.
Q: You posit that a small cadre may have pulled off the murder somehow,
but a much larger group of people--especially inside government--conspired on
the cover-up.
A: There are probably three categories: 1. People actually involved in the
assassination, 2. Those involved in the cover-up, and 3. The Watchers who knew
that the president is going to be murdered. They're not directly conspiring,
but they become criminally responsible because they do not intervene to stop
it. I think it's quite likely that Hoover was in that intermediary category.
Let's just take the {Joseph} Milteer statement. He was a southern racist who
predicted {on a police-monitored phone conversation} that the president would
be shot with a rifle from an office building, and then somebody would be
picked up right away and charged with the murder. First he predicts it, then
after the assassination, he says, "See, it happened the way I said it would."
Hoover knew about all of this before the assassination, and the FBI
intervened both before and after the assassination to minimize the
significance of this uncannily accurate prediction, and they never shared any
of this information with the Warren Commission. Hoover here could be culpable
of something more than just the cover-up.
Q: So Hoover might have also known that Oswald was an FBI informant?
A: I've speculated that he was an FBI informant; it's clear he was
operating in an informant capacity, but who he was informing for is less
clear. He may have been working for a private contractor such as {New Orleans
private investigator} Guy Banister.
Q: Was Oswald just a puppet for people like Banister, or do you think he
really knew what he was working on and why?
A: In my book I called him a double agent, but I really should have called
him a triple agent. On one level he's acting like a leftist, and on another,
deeper level he's acting like a rightist, as though he's getting Fair Play
for Cuba sympathizers to send in their names and addresses to 544 Camp St.
{in New Orleans} which is the address of Guy Banister, who is a very
anti-Castro detective. But then, on a third level, he may have been working
with Banister in order to inform someone else about Banister's own illegal
activities, so that would make him a triple agent.
Once you're dealing with someone who's a double agent--and there are many
historical instances of this--it's hard to know who they're working for, and
sometimes even the individuals don't even know who they're really working
for. Psychologically, they get so into the role playing--their reality is
that they're fake. You can't reduce them to a set of simple motivations like
the rest of us.
Q: The first thing the public ever heard about Oswald was that he was part
of a communist conspiracy. Later, he became "a lone nut." Why?
A: I've said all along there were two phases to the early cover-up: false
stories linking Oswald to Cuba and Soviet Union and phase two, which
substituted the myth of Oswald as the KGB assassin with the story that he was
a lone nut, which is no more true than the phase one story, but was a lot
less likely to risk World War III.
Q: You told your colleagues at the Fredonia conference in July that it's
not so important to learn the identity of the triggermen as to understand the
deep politics behind the assassination. What can that kind of understanding
mean to us as a nation?
A: Remember, I'm not talking about a historic phenomenon. I'm talking
about an ongoing phenomenon. If you focus on the CIA/drug story in the San
Jose Mercury, you're studying the same phenomena. The fact is there is a
symbiosis between high-level people in government and high-level people in
crime. We see it in the drug situation, we saw it in the Kennedy
assassination and in other areas such as the South African Oil Embargo--but
South Africa got its oil, people violated the embargo. We get back to the
same kind of milieu where people are powerful because of their law-breaking,
not refugees and people running from law enforcement. There's a much more
intimate symbiotic relationship between law enforcement and criminal
operations. They're not simply antithetical, as we are taught to believe in
grade school. That's what I mean by deep politics. If we're going to
understand the politics of our country, we're going to have to understand the
deep politics of our country.
-----
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
All My Relations.
Omnia Bona Bonis,
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
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