CONSPIRACY / Mob Connections
SEX, DRUGS, AND JFK: The NEW
TIMES Interview*
Peter Dale Scott
[Editor's Note: During an interview with Russ Tarby
for NEW TIMES, Peter Dale Scott, who has
been called "the
Dean of the Research Community", traces many underworld
connections between the Kennedys and the mob but also
includes links to J. Edgar Hoover and his techniques
for blackmailing prominent politicians.]
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 corrupt 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 of 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, traveled 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. There 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 Marcellon-- 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 po
