Betrayal in Dallas: LBJ, the Pearl Street Mafia, and the Murder of President Kennedy
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Betrayal in Dallas: LBJ, the Pearl Street Mafia, and the Murder of President Kennedy
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Overview
With incredible detail and documentation, Mark North pieces the puzzle together to reveal how, in late 1961, US Attorney General Robert Kennedy and his brother John, who hated LBJ, initiated a covert Organized Crime Task Force investigation of the Civello mob in Dallas. Johnson, through Wade and local federal officials he had placed in power, learned of the plan and cooperated with the Civello mob to have JFK killed. Johnson did this, in part, because he had the power to control any subsequent federal investigation via FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. After the Mafia killed JFK, Johnson stopped Robert Kennedy’s prosecution of the Dallas Mafia.
Betrayal in Dallas is unlike any book written on the JFK assassination. Because its conclusions are based on classified federal documents unknown to the public and research community, it will startle and convince all those who read it. Betrayal in Dallas is what the American people have been waiting for since November 22, 1963.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781626361225 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Skyhorse |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2013 |
| Pages: | 320 |
| Sales rank: | 448,737 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THE ROAD TO TRUTH
When you know the truth, the truth makes you a soldier.
— Gandhi
I BEGAN MY INVESTIGATION into the mystery surrounding the murder of President Kennedy thirty years ago, after viewing the then-suppressed Zapruder film, which graphically details his death. As a historian and former Texas attorney, I came to realize that the Warren Report was mere subterfuge, designed to confuse the American people while allowing the Justice Department to avoid investigation and prosecution of those responsible.
To what purpose? Why allow the conspirators to go unpunished? And in the face of obvious conspiracy, why sacrifice governmental credibility to such an extreme degree?
Only after the deaths of President Lyndon Johnson, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, and U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy was Congress able to reexamine JFK's death. In 1979, the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) formally reversed the conclusion of the Warren Commission by admitting that Kennedy had been killed by conspiracy. Chief counsel to the HSCA Robert Blakey (a former U.S. attorney in the Organized Crime Division) stated publicly that "organized crime was behind the plot to kill John F. Kennedy." Despite this, the Justice Department refused to proceed with investigation and prosecution. Portions of the HSCA's findings were classified and kept from the people.
In 1991, my first book, Act of Treason: The Role of J. Edgar Hoover in the Assassination of President Kennedy, was published and became highly controversial. I was assailed by former FBI agents, the media, and elements within the research community. But my effort made two facts undeniable: Hoover had learned of death threats against JFK before the fact and withheld them from the Secret Service, and he was a longtime political confidant of Vice President Lyndon Johnson.
In 1992, Congress passed the Assassination Materials Disclosure Act. But once again, the Justice Department refused to move forward with the new evidence. Clearly, the Justice Department is paralyzed on the issue of truth in JFK's murder.
I face no such constraint. After years of investigation, I have discovered why JFK was murdered and why the Justice Department refused to pursue the killers. The evidence contained in this book will force the hand of that department by making public what they will not. The contents of secret Justice Department tapings of Mob conversations, recorded by RFK's people in Dallas in the months leading up to Kennedy's murder, should be released by the Justice Department. The tapes include incriminating conversations between Jack Ruby and other mobsters about to be prosecuted by RFK. The people responsible for JFK's murder will become known for the first time.
A classified FBI report from the Dallas special agent in charge (SAC) to Director Hoover, which I obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), reveals that by late 1961, RFK had set in motion a plan to destroy the Dallas Mafia. It reads in part,
The Italians in Dallas were extremely "jumpy" due to the recent visit to Dallas of Attorney General ROBERT KENNEDY. The source stated that the Attorney General was supposed to have asked questions concerning Italians in Dallas and these Italians were convinced that the Government was conducting an intensive investigation into their activities and finances.
RFK's covert operation was intended not only to break the Italian Mafia's Dallas operation, but also to make public their corruption of Vice President Lyndon Johnson, whom the Kennedys hated. Put to the wall by RFK, Johnson and the Dallas Mafia would stand or fall together.
CHAPTER 2UNHOLY ALLIANCE
Our opponents are ruthless, vicious, and resourceful. They will use every weapon at their command.
— U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy Senate hearings on organized crime, June 6, 1961
BY THE TIME Lyndon Johnson made his second run for the U.S. Senate in 1948, the Dallas Mafia had become a powerful, corrupting force in the state of Texas. The Dallas Morning News, concluding Johnson would only worsen the epidemic of crime, warned that he epitomized the "lowest level in character and intelligence."
In the run-up to the fall election, Johnson scrambled for every vote he could get. He was unpopular in conservative Dallas and sought out any faction he thought he could persuade to vote for him. This included the Italian-American community and their Mafia-controlled social organization known as the Anonymous Club (later called Zuroma Club). The club meetings (held in a rented house) were purportedly a weekly gathering of friends for a richly catered, traditional Italian dinner followed by drinks, cigars, and cards. The card games often involved a "heavy hand of poker" with Joe Civello and his associates. In effect, the Anonymous Club (consisting of twenty-five members) operated a gambling house under Texas state law. It was never raided because many Dallas-area law enforcement officials regularly appeared as guests.
Lyndon Johnson's strongest Dallas supporter was an Italian-American activist named Pete Tamburo. Tamburo was a frequent guest and honorary member of the Anonymous Club. During the fall 1948 campaign swings through Dallas, Johnson undoubtedly was taken to the club as Tamburo's guest. There, over whiskey and cigars, LBJ was introduced to members like the Dallas mob boss, Joe Civello. In his determination to win the Texas senate seat, Johnson proved himself willing to seek out every potential supporter, no matter who they were.
Pulitzer Prize — winning author Robert Caro, in Means of Ascent, volume 2 in his landmark Johnson biography, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, saw LBJ for what he became in his quest for power. In essence, Johnson was a "manipulator, a schemer ... unprincipled and unscrupulous." A man without conscience.
LBJ's subsequent theft of the Senate seat through electoral fraud brought about public demand for federal investigation by the FBI. But Johnson was not worried. He and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had been close friends since the early Depression, practically next-door neighbors for many years. They dined together in the evenings and walked their dogs in a nearby Washington park.
LBJ also understood everything that was going on inside Hoover's house. In a time when gay men were being ousted from public service, he had learned that Hoover and his aide Clyde Tolson were lovers. Johnson's secretary, Walter Jenkins, was also homosexual. Hoover knew this and protected Johnson by hiding Jenkins's arrests and private life from the public. One hand washed the other, so to speak.
Because of their symbiotic relationship, Hoover had nothing to gain by investigating LBJ for voter fraud. A few FBI agents appeared in South Texas, but nothing came of it. When pressed, Hoover avoided the media over the issue of Johnson's electoral fraud by feigning bronchial pneumonia. Behind the scenes, Hoover was quick to congratulate Johnson on his illegal seizure of power.
U.S. Attorney General Tom Clark, a former Dallas assistant DA, had developed a highly corrupt relationship with the Mafia. He derailed government efforts to deport them on a mass scale at the close of WWII. Johnson had helped Clark gain employment with the Justice Department in 1937. As they were close friends, the attorney general simply went through the motions.
Extremely ambitious, Johnson, after a little over a year in office, had become Senate Majority Whip. Early in the Korean War, as congressional efforts to deport Italian mobsters intensified, Johnson sought a fivefold increase in allowable numbers of aliens in the military, providing safe harbor against the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). Johnson made Senate minority leader by 1953, the youngest in fifty years.
When the McCarran Act passed that year, the INS resumed its efforts to deport a powerful Dallas mafioso, Frank Ianni, based on his heroin trafficking convictions. Supposedly, only an act of Congress (i.e., private bill) could prevent his deportation. Although none came, Ianni was still spared. I filed a demand under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain Ianni's INS file, only to learn it had been destroyed. Who intervened?
In a time when many mafiosi around the United States were turning to their elected representatives to save them from deportation, Senator Johnson was the logical choice. Known for his corruption and sympathies toward the Dallas mob (and the Anonymous/Zuroma Club), Johnson was recruited to stop the INS action against Ianni through Tom Clark's brother Robert. Bob Clark worked closely with Dallas mob attorneys Maury Hughes and Angelo Piranio. Bob's brother Tom Clark had also worked closely with Angelo Piranio, who had appeared with Ianni at the INS deportation hearings. Another Dallas mobster, convicted murderer Sam Savalli, had also sought out Johnson for help against the INS. Senator Johnson stepped in to act privately as a sponsor, a character witness, in the mobsters' efforts to stop INS proceedings. The process in Ianni's case (and probably Savalli's) was known as an Application for Suspension of Deportation. It got the job done because neither man was deported. Both died years later in Dallas.
Johnson's wife, Lady Bird, a former Dallasite named Claudia Alta Taylor, was, like her husband, an ardent Italophile. Prior to her marriage to LBJ, she had attended the University of Texas at Austin simultaneously with Frank Ianni's son Joe. They lived near each other off campus, and both were registered in the college of arts. Given the small size of the university at the time, they in all likelihood knew each other. Contrary to the public's perception of Lady Bird as a mere wallflower, she was an aggressive, ambitious woman who gravitated to power and partnered with LBJ to seize every opportunity. It was she who persuaded Johnson to purchase their home across the street from Hoover's house when they moved to Washington DC.
Senate Majority leader by mid-decade, LBJ was recognized as the dominant force in Congress. He used his power in the Senate to promote the Italian population in Dallas by working to eliminate the hated quota system used by the INS to limit immigration.
In the fall of 1959, Johnson arranged a private meeting at his ranch with Hoover and began working behind the scenes in the Senate for the purpose of seizing the party nomination for president. Powerful Dallas officials like Judge Sarah Hughes, an avid gambler and favorite of the Italian community, and District Attorney Henry Wade, threw their weight behind LBJ.
Because Wade was a conservative, the public knew little of his association with Johnson. But over the years, beginning with the tainted Senate election, they grew close, as evidenced by the dozens of personal letters between the two. (These letters are reproduced in the Exhibits section of this book.) As they liked to put it, they were 100 percent for each other. His first year as district attorney, Wade began making trips to Washington, where he met privately with LBJ and attended political parties at his house. With Hoover virtually across the street and a regular in the Johnson home, and Wade's status as a former FBI agent, the DA and the FBI director surely knew each other personally.
Wade closely monitored the Dallas political situation for Johnson from 1948 onward. He also traveled to other parts of the state in Johnson's behalf — conducting surveillance on political opponents. As early as 1955, he began urging LBJ to run for the presidency.
When Wade ran for U.S. representative, Johnson wrote, "Let me know what you want or need from me. ... I'm behind you in just about anything you undertake to do and I hope you know it." Wade lost the election but kept his ambition.
In a 1959 letter, Wade made the decision to tie his political future to Johnson's. He wrote, "I have thought some about running for Attorney General of the State next year, but now feel that I will remain here and do what I can in your behalf towards your nomination and whatever assistance I could be in your election. If there is anything that you would like for me to do, please call me. Your devoted friend."
The district attorney gave Johnson his all in the presidential campaign and attended the Democratic convention in Los Angeles. When LBJ lost the party nomination to JFK, Johnson thanked an embittered Wade for his dedication, telling him, "I am deeply grateful to you for all your help and support. It is most rewarding for a man in public life to be able to count on friends like you."
The Pearl Street Mafia counted on Wade as well. In early May 1951, the Dallas Police Department's vice squad staged a highly successful surprise raid on the Civello mob's primary bookmaking operation. Arrested were John Eli Stone, Isadore Miller, and Louie Ferrantello, close criminal associates of Jack Ruby. Ruby was not arrested in the raid, but the others were caught red-handed. Within a few weeks, the state of Texas had Ferrantello appear before its then-ongoing investigation into organized crime activity in Texas. Rather than testify, he took the Fifth Amendment over one hundred times and was cited for contempt of the legislature. One of LBJ's personal attorneys, Everett Looney (a man who had played a key role in Johnson's theft of the 1948 U.S. Senate election), came to Ferrantello's defense, appealing the contempt ruling. It was a point not missed by Jack Ruby.
Ruby, by then a low-level bookmaker in the Civello mob, had come to Dallas in the latter 1940s from Chicago, where he had been a functionary in that city's organized crime operations. Ruby had undoubtedly been drawn to Dallas by LBJ's cohort Tom Clark. The Chicago thug had watched as Clark (a powerful and corrupt figure in the Truman administration's Department of Justice) had arranged the early prison release of several influential Chicago mafiosi. Once in Dallas, Ruby quickly perceived that the path to power and money lay in allying himself with the Pearl Street Mafia. In his association with Ferrantello, he became part of the Civello mob's bookmaking operation. He lost no time in compromising area law enforcement and, like other local mafiosi, avoided effective prosecution.
Despite the Dallas PD's arrest of Ferrantello, DA Wade failed to seize the opportunity handed him by the police department to destroy the Dallas Mafia's bookmaking operation. Stone and the others remained in business and developed the largest bookmaking operation in Dallas by the end of the decade.
Local Mafia boss Joe Civello's gambling lieutenant Joe Ianni also benefitted directly. Several months after the Stone raid, Wade allowed Ianni to avoid a murder prosecution for beating a local man to death in front of witnesses with a wooden club. Thereafter, during the 1950s, the district attorney openly attended the Mob's Anonymous/Zuroma Club, ignoring the exponential growth of illegal syndicate gambling and narcotics trafficking in his city.
Over the years, the populace of Dallas was traumatized by the endless procession of Mafia murders, bombings, and beatings. The sheer savagery of the violence reveals much.
[He] ... was found dead, his throat slashed ear to ear, his face bloody and battered from the jagged edge of a broken liquor bottle.
[Another] ... was riddled with bullets from two guns. All ... were fired at close range. Six were .45 caliber, piercing the left side. A .38 caliber ... bullet pierced the right side, passing through the body and embedding in the heart.
[One man] had been shot in the chest and stabbed in the back. His throat was slashed on both sides, and the back of his head was crushed. ... His hands were cut as though he had tried to grab his assailant's slashing knife. Part of one ear was cut away and there were many cuts and bruises on other parts of his body.
The death car ... was stripped to the bare wheels and chassis by the force of the blast. [The driver] was dismembered ... and her torso hurled about ten feet into the front yard of the couple's home.
A nitroglycerine bomb exploded when [he] pressed the starter button, killing him instantly. His 25-year-old wife, whose child would have been born within a week, was dead on arrival at a hospital. ... It left their automobile a smoldering hulk and blew off [his] head.
A young, female police narcotics informant's "body was found in a lake near Fort Worth, wrapped in chains and anchored with concrete." ... Another was found "beaten and drowned in a roadside ditch."
[A] Dallas narcotics hearing ... backfired ... after the ... witness was discovered dead in a watery ... ditch. ... [He] had been brutally beaten with resultant skull and facial bone fractures.
A bloodstained Cadillac ... was found ... in northwest Dallas County. ... The car was locked, with the key in the ignition, and blood was oozing from the doors.
In Johnson and Wade, the Civello mob found unholy alliance, a powerful combine that could only be broken by federal intervention.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Betrayal in Dallas"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Mark North.
Excerpted by permission of Skyhorse Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Author's Note vii
Introduction x
1 The Road to Truth 1
2 Unholy Alliance 5
3 The Battle Begins 13
4 A War of Extermination 19
5 He Knew Bobby Was Out to Get Him 27
6 A Corridor of Escape 37
7 Forces of Darkness 45
8 Shadows Fall-the Stone Wire 51
9 Exposure and Denial 57
10 The Face of Evil 61
11 Texas Justice 69
12 A Pavlovian Response 79
13 The Prosecution of Ruby 85
14 A Republican Stamp of Approval 89
15 RFK Is Silenced 95
16 Truth Derailed-the Warren Report 101
17 The Big Lie Is Challenged 107
18 Retribution 113
19 The Wheels of Justice 121
20 The Dawn of Truth 129
21 American Traitors 135
22 Prosecution-United States v. Lyndon Baines Johnson, et al 147
23 The Stone Suppression 153
24 Arnold Stone November 22, 1930-December 30, 2012 157
25 What Is Due 167
Acknowledgments 171
Exhibits 173
Source Notes 261
Glossary of Names 293
Bibliography 307