Kennedy's Assassination and The Mafia:Coincidence or Connection

President John Kennedy's assassination has spurred conspiracy theories for half a century. Tune in to this episode to listen to the connections between his death and the mafia. Is it a conspiracy or not?  Send me some feedback at the podcasts instagram page the_z_files_podcast or at thezfilespodcast@gmail.com! 

This episode is composed in admiration for the sheer strength of Jacquelyn Kennedy as she witnessed the murder of her husband and so diligently handled his funeral arrangements in the midst of her family's tragedy.   The best respect we can pay to the family is revealing the truth. 

Episode Sources: 

Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires by Selwyn Raab. 

themobmuseum.org

Music from Law and Order SVU used under the fair use laws and for educational purposes. 

Transcript

In this episode I will take you back to an infamous day in America’s history, the day President John F Kennedy was assassinated, and I will present the evidence I have found behind who orchestrated his death. 

•  It’s 6:30 am in Dallas Texas on November 22, 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald leaves the bed to prepare for work. He puts his wedding ring and $170 from his wallet on his wife Marina’s dresser. He drives to work with his coworker Buell Wesley Fraizer. Buell notices Oswald has a oblong parcel with him, but Oswald explains it’s curtain rods for a room he rents at a boarding house and Bell dismisses his curiosity.  Meanwhile, President Kennedy is at the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth preparing for his day. His agenda includes three speeches in two different cities,  a motorcade through Dallas,  and then arrival at his final destination at the Johnson Ranch for a weekend of relaxation. By 10 AM, he is finished with his first speech and returns to his suite in the Hotel Texas to freshen up before leaving the city. He remarks to his wife Jacquelyn “you know, last night would have been a hell of a night to assassinate a president,” referring to the motorcade through Fort Worth the night before. 
• At 11:50 am in Dallas, Oswald is spotted on the first floor of his office building eating lunch. Across town at Love Field, the presidents motorcade departs and makes its way towards downtown Dallas. The president and his wife are seated in a modified 1961 Lincoln Continental 4 door convertible without the plexiglass weather protection cover. Earlier that day it had rained a little bit, but by noon the sun was out so the president decided to keep the car open and more visible.   Along the way, Kennedy’s motorcade was delayed 5 minutes so the president could shake hands with the people waiting to meet him. This was common for Kennedy to do because one of his goals was to be easily accessible to the people. 
• 12:29 pm The motorcade moved through Dealey PLaza rounded the corner onto Elm Street. The first shot is fired from the 6th floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building. James Tauge is injured by a fragment of the bullet or debris from the street.  Jacquelyn Kennedy is startled as her husband elbows suddenly jerk from their relaxed position to his shoulders and he begins leaning towards her. President Kennedy has just been struck by the second shot in the back of the head.  The injures the C6 area of his spine, causing him to take an immediate Thornburn position. The Thornburn position is characterized by an involuntary distinct movement of the elbows to rare back as if someone is trying to stretch their chest muscles or loosen a tight spot between the shoulder blades, indicating a spinal injury. A third shot is fired and hits the president just behind his right ear.  Jacquelyn Kennedy tries to cradle her husband then frantically crawls over the back of the car to signal someone for help. As the president is rushed to the hospital and local authorities secure the scene, Oswald strolls to a soda machine to buy a Coca Cola. During the aftermath, multiple people come forward with a description of Oswald as a person of interest seen exiting the vicinity of where law enforcement expected the shooter to be. 
• 12:35 Within 5 minutes of the shooting, the President’s limo arrives at Parkland Memorial Hospital. A surgeon uses one of the gun shot wounds to perform a tracheotomy to open up Kennedy’s airway and medical staff desparately attempt to keep the president alive. 
• At 12:45 pm, Oswald boards a city bus back to work, then gets off early and takes a cab back to his boarding house where he changes clothes and takes his pistol. 
• At 12:57 pm. President John F Kennedy was pronounced dead by Dr. Kemp Clark and and his personal physician, Admiral Dr. George Burkley. His time of death was most likely much earlier, however, Jacquelin was worried about him receiving his Catholic last rites before he died so they delayed pronouncing his death until Father Oscar Huber arrived at the hospital. 
• Arrangements are made to have a  coffin brought from nearby to take Kennedy’s body back to DC on Air Force one the same day. Because a presidential assassination was not a federal offense at this time, there was confusion over who had authority to release the body or demand an autopsy, but eventually Dallas district attorney Henry Wade agrees to release the body only if Kenedy’s Private physician, Dr. Burkley, will promise to stay with the body until it is put in the casket for the final time. Vice President Johnson had to call JFK’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy to not only confirm more details of his brother’s death, but also start the process of tranferring the presidency. 
• Meanwhile, police are patrolling the area looking for the shooter, who has already been described by multiple witnesses. Officer JD Tippit speaks to someone matching Oswald’s description and is then reported dead by a civilian a few minutes later.  
• At 1:40 pm, Oswald is taken into custody by force in a movie theater where he was attempting to watch the Film War is Hell. At this time, he is charged with the death of Officer Tippet. He has not been charged with killing the president yet. 
• By 2:38 pm, President Kennedy’s body was on the way to Air Force one in the locally purchased coffin. There was no time to measure or customize the coffin size so secret service had to break some of the handles off the coffin so that it would fit in the plane door. While they settled President Kennedy’s body in the cargo area of Air Force One,  Lyndon B Johnson was sworn into office in the passenger area by Judge Sarah T Hughes, making him the first president to be sworn into office by a woman. He made the oath in the presence of his wife Ladybird Johnson, government officials, and Jacquelyn Kennedy, who was still wearing the clothes stained by her husbands blood. 
• For the rest of the evening, the assassin and the grieving family experience two different types of a grueling 24 hours. Jacquelyn Kennedy makes arrangements for JFK’s body to be embalmed and laid to repose in the white house in a manner that is identical to President Lincoln’s funeral. Oswald was interrogated three times in relation to Officer Tippet’s death. He was not charged with Kennedy’s death until 1:35 am the following morning. 
• By 3:56 am on Novermber 23, not even 24 hours since he was shot, President Kennedy’s body laid in repose in the white house with four soldiers on immediate guard. He would be laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery two days later, on his son’s third birthday.
• On November 24, 1963, Lee HArvey Oswald was shot in the stomach by Jack Ruby as they were transferring him to another facility. He died that same day. 

These are the details of the assasination I have chosen for this episode. It was a famous event in America’s history so I’m sure the parts I talked about today were familiar to many of you listening.  But maybe I have parts of this event to share that you are less familiar with. Have you ever heard of the conspiracy theory that the mafia was behind the Kennedy assassination? Maybe you have and dismissed it. Kennedy’s assassination has been the heart of many conspiracy theories, including one that he is still alive today… Well, I wasn’t drawn to the kennedy assassinatino for the conspiracies. I was actually preparing a class on organized crime when my research about the different mafia leaders and investigations into their crimes brought me face to face with John Kennedy’s death. 

In order to thoroughly explain these connections, I’m turning the clock back to the 1920s, when the Sicilian mafia rose to power.  It was during prohibition that these criminals made their billions and permanently established themselves in America’s crime underworld. The mafia goes by many names including Cosa Nostra, the Family, the Outfit, the Mob, etc.  The most powerful leaders are known as bosses or Godfathers. These bosses are not only constrained to New York City, but can be found in many cities across the country including Seattle WAs, New Orleans, Tampa and Miami Florida, Dallas Texas, Chicago, and Las Vegas just to name a few. Each city has one or more Godfathers who have underbosses, captains, and soldiers underneath them to carry out their criminal empires. The Commission is essentially the council of the most powerful godfathers in the country and serves the purpose of aligning different organization goals as well as keeping territory lines defined. The mafia has always held a strict code known as Omerta. This code values confidentiality above all else. Breaking the code is often met with death, and usually a very unpleasant one.The mafia was shrouded in mystery for half a century even though they had a booming criminal business. Even when ther was suspicion about a nationwide network of organized crime, the only arm of the government with jurisdiction and resources to investigate it was directed by a man who’s ego was too large to admit these criminals had been outsmarting american criminal justice officials for so long. All to say they enjoyed nearly 50 years without any scrutiny from the police or federal officials. This is all the overview we have time to cover for our purposes today, but if you want to learn more about organized crime in America let me know via the z files podcast @ gmail.com or comment on this episodes post on the account instagram profile. 

Let’s hash out the Kennedy mafia connection. The main reason a mafia connection to Kennedy’s assasinatino is officially discredited is due to the poor investigation that was done following the event. Much of the evidence of this connection was obtained unconstitutionally and inadmissible in court. In the National Archives you can find the document stating the SEnate Committee’s findings and they state they did not find evidence that the Soviety Union or Cuban government were involved in the assassination, and that although they also couldn’t find evidence of a national crime syndicate involved in the proceedings, that does not  mean individual members of the syndicate weren’t involved in the assassination. When they concluded this in their report, they didn’t realize how much evidence had been destroyed.  It was the way this investigation happened and the motives of those in charge that spun any mafia interference as conspiracy instead of reporting the facts for how they were. FBI director Hoover was in charge of the investigation immediately following John Kennedy’s death. He assigned the assasination probe to the FBI division that handled bank robbery and the destruction of federal property investigations. The two most qualified FBI units involving national security and organized crime were obstructed from participating in the investigation. There is no mystery here why Hoover gave the investigation over to an unqualified unit. The truth is, a more qualified group would have exposed the illegal bugging Hoover had been doing for decades. By the time the congressional committee began its work in the late 1970s, a lot of the recorded tapes with people talking about their hatred of the Kennedys had been destroyed. 

Evidence that many Mob leaders feared Attorney General Robert Kennedy’s vendetta against them and their hatred of the family were found by the Warren Commissino’s investigation in the FBI audio files recorded from bugs. Most of the threats taken from mobsters were taken from snippets of longer conversations but their message was clear, they despised the Kennedy brothers. 

I will share the snippets that were preserved long enough to reach the senate commission. 

In February 1962, FBI agents listened to inflammatory remarks between Ganelo Bruno, the boss of the Philadelphia mob, and a trusted business associate Willie Weisberg. Weisberg said “See what Kennedy done, with kennedy, a guy should take a knife, like one of them other guys, and stab and kill him, where he isnow….I’ll kill him. Right in the White house, somebody’s got to get rid of this    f word. 

On May 2, 1962, agents overheard Michelino Clemente, an important captain of the Genovese crime family, express his views to several mob soldiers that “Bob Kennedy, won’t stop today until he puts us all in jail over the country. Until the Commission meets and puts its foot down, things will be at a stand still.”

A year later, in May 1963, Stafano Magadinno, cousin of the Godfather Joe Bonanno, and member of the “Commission” was recorded saying “we are in a bad situation in Cosa Nostra. They know everything under the sun. They know who’s part of it, they know amici, they know capodecina, they know there is a Commission. We got to watch right now, this thing, where it goes and stay as quiet as possible. 

A month before the assasination, Magadinno’s son Peter, heatedly told his father that “the president should drop dead. They should kill the whole family, the mother and father too. 

 The Kennedy family’s run in with the mob actually starts with John Kennedy’s dad, Joseph Kennedy. Before he was an ambassador to Great Britain or even a father to the political dynasty of his sons, he was involved with bootlegging operations during Prohibition. Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana knew Jospeh Kennedy during these days and sustained their relationship throughout the years. Illinois was critically important in the 1960 campaign, and Giancana’s political connections that delivered votes in Chicago may have well tipped the scales towards John Kennedy’s win. 

While their father may have been friendly with the mob, Robert and John Kennedy had already started political efforts to dismantle organized crime before John Kennedy was president. Both brothers had served on the Senat’es McClellan committee on organized crime. John as a Senator and Robert as legal counsel. This committee was dedicated to investigating the crimes of the mafia, which at that point was a criminal entity the FBI denied existed. One of main figures who held a grudge against the brothers was the New Orleans mob boss, Carlos Marcello. He was known to the police for serving 9 years for assault and robbery charges, along with a bank robbery and marijuan charge thrown in here and there. Marcello was called to testify before the committee in 1959 but plead the 5th Amendemnt against self-incrimination and refused to testify. Shortly after, John Kennedy became president and appointed his brother Robert at Attorney General. Robert used immigration law to have Marcello deported to Guatemala. He went from living a lavish lifestyle with mob soldiers at his every beck and call, to exile in a country where he had no connections. He suffered greatly after being deposited in a small local jail and having to walk himself across country borders until he could utilize his connectinos. Eventually he found his way back to the US, and with his return he brought a healthy loathing of the Kennedy family who had nearly dismantled his crime empire in New Orleans.

Robert Kennedy and Marcello had mutual hatred for one another. Marcello had been humiliated and suffered greatly by being deported, and Robert Kennedy was angry that the mobster had been able to avoid serious jail time with his backing from corrupt state and city government officials.  You see, Marcello was well known to law enforcement for an array of assault, bank robbery, and marijuan charges. 

In September of 1962, Carlos Marcello was quoted saying “Don’t worry about that little Boby son of a -B, He’s going to be taken care of.” Marcello told that same person that in order to get Bobby Kennedy they would need to take out the president. They couldn’t kill Bobby directly because the president would use the army and Marines to get them. Marcello stated that killling president Kennedy would cause Bobby to lose his power as attorney general because of the new president. MArcelllo also made a reference to President Kennedy being a dog and Robert Kennedy being a dogs tail. He said the dog will keep biting you if you cut off its tail, but that if the dog’s head is cut off, the dog would die.

The summer before Kennedy’s assasination, Lee Harvey Oswald lived with his uncle Charlest Dutz Murret in New Orleans. His uncle was a well-known associate of the MArcello organized crime group. Like the summer heat, political tensions rose that summer as President Kennedy backed his brother Robert to target organized crime activity in the United States. This offended the mafia across the country at their core. They had enjoyed little legal attention from the government at this point. They were able to either pay off most officials or if their crimes were found out, they were treated as isolated incidents that didn’t lead back to the entire network of organized crime. What nerve did these Kennedy brothers have to put the Mob on blast, especially after The Chicago Outfit had helped obtain votes as a favor to papa Kennedy. Not to mention an Attorney General with his brother as President to clear all the red tape in his mafia hunting agenda made an intimidating duo for the mafia. 

16 years after the Warren Commission finished its work, more indirect evidence about the mafia’s role in the Kennedy assassination surfaced. The new information came from Frank Ragano, a lawyer from the mob bosses Santo Trafficante, Marcello and Jimmy Hoffa. Santo Trafficante Jr had mob rackets in both Tamp and Miami Florida. Him and Marcello’s mob activity held down the southern mafia district. Ragano claimed that shortly before Trafficante died, he made statements confirming the mob’s orchestration of Kennedy’s assasination. In the months before the assassination Ragano was at a dinner with Sam Giancano of the Chicago outfit  who said, that rat bsatard son of a bitch, we broke our balls for him and gave him the election and gets his brother to hound us to death. Shortly after the assaination Ragano was at yet another dinner with upper level mob leaders, including the godfather Tommy Lucchese when Lucchese sarcastically remarked that the shooting couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Jimmy Hoffa had requested that Ragano instructed him to make a plan with Carlos Marcello to kill that son of a bitch Kennedy. Ragano thought it was a joke but decided to relay the message to Marcello in a meeting they had together with Trafficante the next day. When Ragano told them the kill request from Hoffa, neither of the godfathers laughed but started back in icy silence,. On November 22, 1963, Jimmy Hoffa telephoned Ragano at his office and said “Did you hear the good news? Yeah, he’s dead, I heard over the news that Lyndony Johnson is going to be sworn in as president. You know he’ll get rid of Booby (Hoffa’s nickname for Robert Kennedy”  Three days after the assasination Ragan attended a meeting in Hoffas office in DC. Hoffa refused to allow the American flag on the building to be lowered to half mast out of respect for the president. After the meeting, he pulled Ragano aside and whispered, I’ll never forget what Carlos and Santo did for me. And one of the last confessions of the mob involvement came from Trafficante almost a quarter of a century after the assassination. At 72, Trafficante was ill on dialysis for his kidney’s and about to under-go openheart surgery. While Ragano was taking him for a drive, Trafficante chatted with Ragano in Sicilian. He said, “God damn Bobby. I think Carlos fucked up in getting rid of Giovanni, maybe it should have been Bobby. We shouldn’t have killed Giovanni. We should have killed Bobby…Giovanni was the Sicilian name used to refer to John Kennedy. 

In a court of law, I would have sufficiently established a motive for the death of John Kennedy at this point. But I’m not finished yet. The last piece of this puzzle includes The assassin of Lee Harvey Oswald himself, Jack Ruby. Jack Ruby was a strip club operator in Dallas. His night club was known as the Carousel Club and was a watering hole for local mafiosi, many of them working for one of Marcello’s underbosses. He was raised in the Chicago Jewish Ghetto and became involved in juvenile gangs as soon as he could keep up. He had a rap sheet two feet long filled with numerous violent incidents, carrying concealed weapons, and managing countless night clubs. True to mafioso form, he had no convictions despite his many crimes, a true testament to the Mob’s power to utilize connections with law enforcement and government officials.  Jack Ruby also wrote to the Warren Commission begging to tell the truth. However, he said he was afraid to speak because the prison he was in wasn’t safe. He refused to spill the tea until he could be moved to another facility. He died at age 55 in 1967 from a blood clot that was complicated by cancer…and with that all loose ends were taken care of. 

 I will let you form your own conclusions from here. I’ve done my best to include the full names of the people I discussed tonight along with locations and dates to enable anyone to do their own research. Please share your thoughts about these events on the show's instagram page! 

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