JFK Assassination

April 11, 2011

Frank Sturgis

Three years after he was arrested as a Watergate burglar, Frank Sturgis told Senate investigators he was a CIA agent who would do anything for the agency—even kill. To flaunt his expertise, Sturgis volunteered a grisly “How to Get Away with Murder” tutorial for the committee. He bragged that his reputation as a hit man led the FBI to grill him as a prime suspect in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.   

 by Don Fulsom

Best-known as one of President Richard Nixon’s five inept Watergate burglars, Frank Sturgis would undoubtedly prefer to be recalled as a swashbuckling CIA assassination specialist who would gladly bump off anyone for the agency.  In fact, in secret 1975 testimony before a Senate committee, Sturgis proudly described himself a “whore” who “would do anything” for the CIA.

Sturgis’s boast lies buried in his lengthy, closed-door testimony to a post-Watergate Senate investigation of alleged CIA and FBI crimes and abuses.  A bi-partisan committee chaired by Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat, conducted the investigation.  Sturgis’s testimony was declassified—but mostly ignored—in the 1990s.

Updated 09/19/09

John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy

Despite a 1990s law mandating the release of all JFK assassination-related documents, an estimated one million such CIA records have yet to be declassified. Some of the most critical pertain to CIA agent George Joannides (a.k.a. Walter Newby) who violated the CIA’s pledge that no CIA operational officer from the time of the JFK assassination would work with U.S. House investigators.

by Don Fulsom

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and his agents concealed critical evidence about the gruesome murder of President John F. Kennedy in the streets of Dallas in 1963.

A mid-70s conclusion by a Senate Committee headed by Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat, found that the Warren Commission’s investigation of the assassination—conducted mainly by the FBI—“was deficient” and “impeaches the process whereby the intelligence agencies arrived at their own conclusions.”

In 1979, a special House investigating committee concurred—describing the FBI’s probe as “seriously flawed” and “insufficient to have uncovered a conspiracy.”

That committee’s own investigation showed a probable plot to kill the President, a plot likely involving the Mafia and certain anti-Castro groups.

November 25, 2005

Ruby shooting Oswald (Sunday, November 24)
– Warren Commission Exhibit #2636

Contrary to the claims of conspiracy writers, Jack Ruby died telling the truth. There is no credible evidence he was part of a conspiracy. Ruby murdered Oswald for personal reasons – he wanted to show that ''Jews had guts''; he felt emotionally distraught about the Kennedys, and he wanted to fulfil his life long dream of becoming a real hero.

by Mel Ayton

In March of 1964, 52-year-old Jack Ruby was found guilty of the murder of John F. Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, and sentenced to die.

For 32 months, since the time he shot Oswald, Ruby had been locked in a windowless cell on the Dallas County Jail's corridor 6-M. A ''suicide watch'' guard looked in on him around the clock – a single exposed light bulb glared over his bed. Several times Ruby would make attempts on his own life.

Ruby could not tell night from day. He read every newspaper he could lay his hands on, eagerly sifting them for his name. He read dozens of books, including Perry Mason novels and the Warren Report, played cards with his guards, did physical exercises – and seemed out of his mind most of the time, according to jail staff.

Ruby was clearly tipping over the edge in his psychosis and paranoia. He rammed his head against the plaster walls and raved over and over about the suffering Jews who were being killed as revenge for his crime. Near the end, Ruby screamed that his prison guards were piping mustard gas into his cell. Later, when his doctors discovered that he was suffering from brain tumors and adenocarcinoma – a cancer that had spread swiftly through most of the cavities, ducts and glands of his body, Ruby accused them of injecting him with the disease – a medical impossibility.

October 16, 2006

President Kennedy and Jackie arriving at Love Field,
Dallas, Texas, November 22, 1963. Photo courtesy NARA.

New Orleans godfather Carlos Marcello – with Jimmy Hoffa as his bagman – funded Richard Nixon's 1960 presidential bid with $500,000 in cash stuffed in a suitcase. Later Marcello – known as the Big Daddy of the Big Easy – would be named a key conspirator in President Kennedy's assassination.

by Don Fulsom

At the start of the 1920s, marijuana use in America was concentrated in New Orleans – and its intoxicating vapors were mainly inhaled by migrant workers from Mexico, by blacks, and by a growing number of "low-class" whites. Sailors and immigrants from the Caribbean brought this "new" (Its known uses go back to 7,000 B.C.) drug into major southern U.S. ports – above all into the Crescent City.

Along with jazz, pot traveled north to Chicago, and then east to Harlem – where it soon became an indispensable part of the music scene, even entering the language of the black hits of the day (Louis Armstrong's "Muggles," Cab Calloway's "That Funny Reefer Man" and Fats Waller's "Viper's Drag").

A squat but muscular fireplug of a man, rising New Orleans mobster Carlos Marcello was perfectly placed to make boatloads of money from illegal marijuana shipped into his territory. In 1938, though, Marcello sold 23 pounds of pot to an undercover agent. Convicted and sentenced to one year in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, Marcello was also fined more than $75,000. Using his political influence, that particular "Reefer Man" was able to get the fine reduced to just $400. And he was out of prison in nine months. With Louisiana Mafia boss Sam Carolla pulling the strings, Gov. O.K. Allen – a former stooge of assassinated Sen. Huey Long – provided the leniency. Legend has it that Marcello eventually had a tailor sew a foot-long pocket into the left leg of his trousers, "which he would stuff with cash as he made his rounds through (Jefferson) Parish paying off the police one by one."

From pot dealing, police-and politician-corrupting street thug, Marcello graduated to godfather of New Orleans (and Dallas), governing a vast and violent criminal empire that brought in an estimated $2 billion-a-year. He succeeded Sam Carolla, who was deported to Sicily in 1947. Marcello quickly became a generous financial supporter of Richard Nixon; and, eventually, a suspect in the murder of Nixon's nemesis: President John F. Kennedy.

Nov. 11. 2006 Updated March 12, 2007

Members of the Warren Commission present their report on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.  L-R: John McCloy, J. Lee Rankin (General Counsel), Senator Richard Russell, Representative Gerald Ford, Chief Justice Earl Warren, President Lyndon B. Johnson, Allen Dulles, Senator John Sherman Cooper, and Representative Hale Boggs. Credit: LBJ Library photo by Cecil Stoughton

Warren Commission member Congressman Gerald Ford pressed the panel to change its description of the bullet wound in President Kennedy's back and place it higher to make "the magic bullet" theory plausible, enabling the Warren Commission to conclude that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman. Ford was J. Edgar Hoover's informant on the commission and did the FBI director's bidding to squelch the investigation from naming other assassins. When a Dallas County deputy constable heard shots coming from the nearby grassy knoll, he rushed there to find veteran CIA asset Bernard Barker, posing as a Secret Service agent. No Secret Service agents had been assigned to cover the grassy knoll and all accompanied President Kennedy to the hospital.

by Don Fulsom

At approximately 12:30 p.m. on Nov. 22 1963, in Dallas's downtown Dealey Plaza, a large and friendly crowd lined the street, cheering and waving excitedly at the approaching presidential motorcade. Riding in the third car – an oversized Lincoln with its Plexiglas "bubble" top removed – were President John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, and Texas Gov. John Connally and his wife, Nellie. As the limousine carrying the Connallys and the Kennedys wound its way through the hospitable crowds, Nellie Connally turned to President Kennedy, who was seated behind her, and said, "Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you." Then the shots rang out.

Today, more than four decades later, the details on specifically how and by whom President Kennedy was assassinated are still open to question.

According to the report of the Warren Commission, released in September 1964 after a full year investigation, one single shooter – Lee Harvey Oswald – killed Kennedy and wounded Gov. Connally by firing three bullets from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository.