“Except your guys.”
“With a vengeance, I’m proud to say. In summary, each of those mobsters had a motive to want JFK dead, and each rejoiced at the news that he was dead. But”—Stone leans forward like a professor making a salient point—“just because you want someone dead doesn’t make you a murderer.”
“If it did, I’d be in jail myself.”
“Exactly.” Stone drums his fingers on his legal pad. “Of the mobsters, Sam Giancana had particular reason to hate Kennedy. ‘Momo’ had helped get JFK elected president in 1960, by pushing key wards in Chicago and West Virginia Kennedy’s way. Being persecuted by brother Bobby after that election must have pushed him close to violent retaliation. This was aggravated by the fact that Sam and JFK shared a mistress—Judith Exner—but Momo never acted on his hatred.”
“You sound pretty sure.”
“We had the Chicago Outfit under electronic surveillance for years before the mob even knew about planted microphones—both before and after the assassination. Sam G. and his crew bitched and ranted endlessly about both Kennedys, but there was never even a hint that they’d moved against them.”
“Jimmy Hoffa wanted Kennedy dead more than anyone else,” Kaiser says.
Stone concedes this with a nod. “Hoffa was heard many times to threaten both Kennedys, and he asked Sam G. and Marcello to whack JFK. But in my group’s opinion, that never came to anything either. Hoffa was a hothead, a loose cannon. If Momo or Marcello had moved against Kennedy, they would have done it for their own reasons, not as a favor to Hoffa. All testimony to the contrary by mob lawyer Frank Ragano was fabricated. Ragano made up those stories years later, trying to get a book deal.”
I have to fight the urge to ask him to skip ahead to my father. “So, that leaves Marcello and Roselli?”
“And Santo Trafficante. Johnny Roselli was the main link between the CIA and the Mafia during their attempts to kill Castro. He was close to both Giancana and Trafficante, but nothing ties him or them to Dallas and Dealey Plaza. Frank Ragano told a story about Trafficante ordering him to tell Marcello they’d screwed up by killing JFK—that they should have killed Bobby instead—but that was more bullshit. As a coda to that line of inquiry, Giancana was murdered in 1975, shortly before he was to testify before a Senate Select Committee investigating mob-CIA collusion in the JFK assassination. It sounds suspicious, I know, but Giancana was actually killed over a dispute about Iranian casino revenues. One year later, Roselli did testify before that committee, about the CIA-mob efforts to murder Castro. Days later he was found floating in an oil drum off Miami. Roselli knew a lot about his bosses, but nothing about the JFK assassination.”
“I guess we’re down to Marcello, then?”
“‘Uncle Carlos,’” Stone intones. “The king of New Orleans, and the most powerful don in the United States.”
His timbre sounds weirdly like affection, and reminds me of my mother’s use of that nickname. I think of my father and his time in New Orleans. If Marcello really was that powerful, and Dad was in a position to do him favors at the parish prison, how could a lowly medical extern have resisted?
“If the story I’m about to tell you sounds like it was written by Mario Puzo,” says Stone, “that’s because there’s a lot of Carlos Marcello in The Godfather.”
The old FBI man begins to speak in a soft but spellbinding baritone that reminds me of the agent I knew in another life. “In 1910, Carlos Marcello was born Calogero Minacori in Tunis. His parents were Sicilian, but Carlos himself never went to Sicily. He once famously said to another mobster who tried Sicilian on him: ‘I don’t talk dat shit, only English.’”
Kaiser chuckles from the sofa. “That sounds just like Carlos. I’ve heard the BRILAB tapes.”
Stone presses on like a man who knows he has only so much stamina remaining. “When Calogero was an infant, his parents emigrated to a plantation near Metairie, Louisiana. The boy changed his name while very young to better assimilate with the children in his new country. As a boy he hauled vegetables in the swamp parishes south of New Orleans, but he soon figured out that crime paid better. As a teenager, he ran an armed robbery gang that preyed on the surrounding towns. Carlos carried a sawed-off shotgun on a sling, and he killed anyone who got in his way or questioned his leadership. The bodies usually went into the nearby swamps, into the bellies of alligators.”
Kaiser gives me a pointed look. “Sound familiar?”
“At eighteen,” Stone continues, “Carlos was sentenced to nine years in Angola Prison for robbery and assault. The state let him out after five, and he went right back to his old ways. This is the period during which Brody Royal and his father came to know Carlos. At twenty-seven, Marcello was arrested with twenty-three pounds of marijuana in his possession. He got another stiff prison sentence and a seventy-five-thousand-dollar fine, but this time he was released after only ten months. Why? Because somehow, he had attracted the notice of Frank Costello, head of the Genovese crime family in New York.
“That connection was the making of him. After cutting a gambling deal with Huey Long, Costello chose Carlos to move illegal slot machines into New Orleans. Using his six brothers, local muscle, and the influence of the Long political machine, Carlos eventually forced one-armed bandits into every redneck honky-tonk, black juke joint, Cajun dive bar, and whorehouse from Grand Isle to Raceland—five thousand in all. Within ten years, he’d seized control of all gambling rackets in Louisiana.”