KAISER: Marcello was scared shitless by this time. His trial started on November first, and every night was consumed by strategizing for the proceedings. Banister had been working a deal to bribe one of the jurors, but Carlos couldn’t rely on that. He had to be thinking about pulling the trigger with Frank Knox.
STONE: We know for a fact that Carlos spent the two weekends prior to Kennedy’s assassination at Churchill Farms. We also know that Ferrie was there with Carlos for one of those weekends. That was the bill I mentioned, for “legal services.” And Marcello actually paid it.
ME: Isn’t this pretty late in the game to be planning something?
KAISER: It had to be late in the game. Remember Stone’s Razor? This is the only timeline that eliminates coincidence from the plan.
ME: So when and how did Oswald get recruited for Frank Knox’s job?
STONE: The final weekend. November fifteenth through seventeenth. There’s no other possibility. The motorcade route was finalized on Friday the fifteenth. It wasn’t made public, but Dallas police officers were made privy to the route on that day.
KAISER: The Joseph Civello mob in Dallas had hundreds of cops on their payroll. They could easily have passed that information to Marcello. He was their overboss, after all. By Commission law, Carlos owned Dallas.
STONE: Imagine that final weekend. A heatwave had just broken in New Orleans that November. They’ve turned on the heat out at Marcello’s swamp house. Ferrie’s there with him, sweating like a pig. Marcello is crazed with rage. He can give orders to judges, governors, even senators, yet Bobby Kennedy is about to kick his butt out of the country. It was intolerable, and I think that sometime on that last weekend—probably Friday night—Carlos snapped. Maybe the scheme to bribe the juror fell through, or maybe Carlos just didn’t trust it. But he made the decision to have Frank Knox kill JFK. Of course, he needed a cutout to send the message to Frank, and also to pass on the motorcade information. And who was ready to hand?
ME: David Ferrie.
KAISER: Ferrie was a good courier because he was an ace pilot. And Carlos had easy access to planes. He was a big-time marijuana smuggler. So it would be easy for Ferrie to fly up to Natchez or Vidalia with Frank’s go order.
STONE: Only Ferrie didn’t take that flight. Because after Carlos gave him the motorcade info—which had to be either a map or a list of streets and turns—Ferrie had the epiphany of his life.
ME: Oh, my God.
STONE: You see now? Ferrie saw that the presidential motorcade was going to run right past the warehouse where Lee Harvey Oswald was working. He was one of the few people in the world who knew that.
ME: How did Ferrie know? Oswald told him at some point?
STONE: He must have. We’re not sure how. My guess is by letter. Lee was a big letter writer, and I think Ferrie would have told him to send word about whether he’d made it to Cuba or not. If Lee wrote to Ferrie any time between October fifteenth and November twelfth, Ferrie could have received the letter and learned where he was working.
KAISER: Ferrie could have visited Lee sometime during those four weeks. I wouldn’t rule that out, but there’s no need to go that far. All we need is for Lee to have let Ferrie know he’d gotten the job at the Book Depository.
STONE: When Ferrie saw that motorcade route, he must have felt like he was witnessing divine intervention. Like God was reaching down to save him and Marcello at the last possible moment.
KAISER: I think Ferrie turned it over in his mind for one night. Using Oswald would be a risk, but the advantages were too great to ignore. Lee had a rifle and the ability to use it. The attack on General Walker proved that he had the will to use it. And best of all, Lee had spent the summer publicly agitating for the Castro regime. Hell, he’d defected to Russia! And he’d tried to defect to Cuba. If Lee killed JFK, nobody was even going to think about Carlos Marcello.
STONE: And with any luck, the whole country might start screaming for LBJ to invade Cuba, which would get Marcello and the mob their casinos back.
ME: That’s how he sold Carlos.
STONE: Bingo. The whole Oswald-as-patsy, blame-it-on-a-nut angle has always been too much of a stretch. There was a Sicilian tradition of using mental defectives to take the fall for gang murders, but Carlos wouldn’t have taken the risk had he not had a lot more to gain from Oswald than that.
KAISER: Remember how desperate Carlos was. He was within days of being booted out of America. I think Ferrie pitched his plan as God’s deliverance, the miracle they’d been praying for. Carlos would have remembered Dutz Murret’s nephew, of course. You don’t get where Carlos was by forgetting people.
STONE: Marcello might have been skeptical at first, but it was hard to find a downside in Ferrie’s plan. If Lee lost his nerve or missed, Frank Knox could still take out the president, and Lee could still be blamed.
ME: But what if Oswald was captured? What if he talked?
STONE: I don’t think Lee was meant to live more than fifteen minutes after the assassination. The safest plan would have been for Frank to kill him shortly afterward. But that’s where the operation went wrong. When Oswald saw Kennedy’s head explode through his crappy little scope, he knew he hadn’t fired that shot. At that point, he probably panicked. Lee skipped whatever post-hit rendezvous he was supposed to make—probably with Ferrie, in his mind—and there Marcello’s plan went off the rails.
KAISER: It still worked. And Oswald died anyway.
ME: Let me guess. The mob had to hire Jack Ruby at the last minute to shut Oswald up before he could give away anything?
STONE: It’s possible. Ruby has been tied to the Civello mob, and through them to Marcello’s people. But it might be that Ruby was just what he seemed—a pissed-off loser who thought the world would call him a hero for killing the man who’d shot the president. Oswald actually died the way he did because he panicked, went home for his pistol, then killed Officer Tippit during his senseless flight.