PART 6: FINAL JUDGMENT THE MISSING LINK IN THE JFK ASSASSINATION CONSPIRACY

FINAL JUDGMENT 

The Missing Link in the 

JFK Assassination Conspiracy

By MICHAEL COLLINS PIPER 

Chapter Twelve 

An Opiate for the Masses: 

The Lansky-CIA-Southeast 

Asian Drug Pipeline and 

the Mossad Connection 

Tampa, Florida Mafia boss Santo Trafficante, Jr. has frequently been mentioned as a possible mastermind behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The media has also portrayed Trafficante as the prime mover behind the international heroin racket operating out of Southeast Asia. However, the truth is that it was Meyer Lansky who was the primary architect of the global drug operations. Trafficante was his immediate underling. 

The Lansky heroin pipeline was conducted through the CIA-backed French Corsican Mafia in Marseille and used the CIA's covert activities in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War as a cover for its operations. In fact, all the evidence suggests that the drug smuggling was a joint CIA-Organized Crime venture. What's more, Lansky's chief drug money laundering bank in Switzerland was a Mossad operation. Thus, the Lansky Crime Syndicate/Mafia connections with Israel's allies in the CIA are even deeper and more intimate than we have been led to believe. 

Veteran JFK assassination researcher Peter Dale Scott has suggested that "the flood of drugs into this country since World War II was one of the major 'unspeakable' secrets leading to the ongoing cover-up of the Kennedy assassination."385 Scott is correct, for any careful, in-depth examination of the global drug racket shows conclusively that Israel's allies in the Lansky crime syndicate and the CIA are very much a part of the international drug racket. 

Students of the global drug trade are indebted to Professor Alfred McCoy of the prestigious University of Wisconsin at Madison for his ground-breaking expose of the real origins of the modern-day drug crisis. First published in 1972—despite the strongest efforts of the CIA to block its publication—McCoy's classic work, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, has withstood the test of time. 

https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2017/09/part-1-politics-of-heroin-in-se-asia.html

In 1992 McCoy re-issued the work under the title The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. The new edition is an equally remarkable work which not only includes additional findings uncovered in the subsequent 20 years since its initial publication, but also a valuable preface in which McCoy outlines the CIA operations against his research and the publication of the book. 

THE DRUG BOSS

Although the Establishment media has repeatedly pinpointed Santo Trafficante, Jr., Mafia boss of Tampa, as the brains behind the Southeast Asian drug traffic, McCoy makes it very clear that Trafficante was simply operating as Lansky's underling. McCoy describes the origins of the Lansky-Trafficante relationship: 

"During the 1930's Meyer Lansky 'discovered' the Caribbean for northeastern syndicate bosses and invested their illegal profits in an assortment of lucrative gambling ventures. In 1933 Lansky moved into the Miami Beach area and took over most of the illegal off-track betting and a variety of hotels and casinos. He was also reportedly responsible for organized crime's decision to declare Miami a 'free city' (that is, not subject to the usual rules of territorial monopoly). 

"Following his success in Miami, Lansky moved to Havana for three years, and by the beginning of World War II he owned the Hotel Nacional's casino and was leasing the municipal racetrack from a reputable New York bank. 

"Burdened by the enormous scope of his holdings, Lansky had to delegate much of his responsibility for daily management to local gangsters. One of Lansky's earliest associates in Florida was Santo Trafficante, Sr., a Sicilian-born Tampa gangster. Trafficante had earned his reputation as an effective organizer in the Tampa gambling rackets and was already a figure of some stature when Lansky first arrived in Florida. By the time Lansky returned to New York in 1940, Trafficante had assumed responsibility for Lansky's interests in Havana and Miami. 

TRAFFICANTE THE FRONT MAN 

"By the early 1950's Trafficante had himself become such an important figure that he delegated his Havana concessions to Santo Trafficante, Jr., the most talented of his six sons. The younger Santo's official position in Havana was that of manager of the Sans Souci Casino, but he was far more important than his title indicates. 

"As his father's financial representative, and ultimately Meyer Lansky's, Santo Jr. controlled much of Havana's tourist industry and became quite close to the pre-Castro dictator, Fulgencio Batista. Moreover, it was reportedly his responsibility to receive bulk shipments of heroin from Europe and forward them through Florida to New York and other major urban centers, where the distribution was assisted by the local Mafia bosses." 386 

LANSKY MOVES TO THE TOP 

Lansky biographer Hank Messick makes it very clear that it was Trafficante Jr. who played a key role in ensuring Lansky's dominance over syndicate gambling in Cuba. It was Trafficante who helped orchestrate the assassination in 1957 of Lansky rival, New York Mafia figure Albert Anastasia, the most vocal Italian Mafia critic of Lansky's growing influence in the Cuban gambling rackets. Anastasia's removal from the scene was vital to Lansky's ultimate dominance. 

Messick notes that Trafficante got caught in the middle between Albert Anastasia and Lansky over the Havana gambling. Not only did Trafficante opt to abandon his fellow Italian Mafia figure, but Trafficante also swore a blood oath Mafia-style, assuring Lansky of his support. 

"So long as the blood flows in my body," he intoned solemnly, "do I, Santo Trafficante, swear allegiance to the will of Meyer Lansky and the organization he represents. If I violate this oath, may I burn in hell forever."387 

He signed it in his own blood. It was shortly thereafter, on October 25, 1957, that Anastasia was shot dead after what he wrongly believed to have been a friendly meeting in New York with Trafficante. Anastasia should have known what was coming. After all, according to Messick, he had, shortly before, told his fellow Mafia figures what he thought of them: "You bastards have sold yourselves to the Jews."388 

(Interestingly enough, Lansky's friendly biographical cheerleader, Robert Lacey, never mentions the Lansky-Anastasia stand-off that led to the Lansky rival's murder.) 

Organized crime authority Dan Moldea summarized the Lansky-Trafficante relationship best and most succinctly: "Trafficante was deeply devoted to Lansky." 389 

THE MAFIA UNDER FIRE 

It was shortly after Albert Anastasia's murder that public attention began focusing on Organized Crime as a result of media publicity. It was not, in fact, until the infamous Mafia conclave at Appalachian, New York, in 1957 that the media began hyping "the Mafia" as a major force in organized crime. 

Americans had long been aware of legendary mobsters such as Al Capone and Lucky Luciano, but general awareness that a national crime syndicate did indeed exist was not commonplace. 

Following a police raid of the Appalachian conference attended exclusively by top Mafia figures from around the country, Trafficante included—public attention began focusing on "the Mafia"—thanks to the media. 

The official story has always been that a local policeman just happened to stumble upon the conclave at the home of Mafia figure Joseph Barbara. The officer called in reinforcements and a major "bust" took place, following a heated chase of the Mafia figures through the briars and brambles of the rural countryside. 

However, according to Hank Messick, the police had been tipped off by a Lansky associate that the meeting was about to take place. Messick described the consequences of the Appalachian raid: 

"The delegates were scattered before any alliance could be reached. And the publicity caused the greatest heat since the 1930's. It focused not only on the men who attended the session but on the entire Mafia. What's more, it continued for well over a year as state and federal officials tried to find some charge to stick against the delegates they had captured or identified. Not only were Mafia leaders immobilized by the continuing publicity, but also they were demoralized. Almost instinctively they rallied to Lansky and other non-Mafia syndicate leaders for advice and assistance."390 

(Perhaps not coincidentally, one of the attorneys who played a key role in the Appalachian investigation was one Justin Finger. It was Finger who later went on to become chief of the "civil rights division" of the Lansky financed Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith, the primary intelligence and propaganda arm of Israel's Mossad in the United States.) 

Despite all this, as Messick notes, Trafficante himself stood to benefit. According to Messick: "Trafficante was a little annoyed at the publicity he received—after being picked up with the rest—but was soon mollified when he discovered he was now being hailed as the Mafia boss of Florida by the press. Glory was as important as loot to the Mafia mind."391 

Clearly, a close working relationship between Lansky and Trafficante had been cemented. It continued for many years, up to and including—and beyond—the critical year of 1963. It was in 1970, however, that Lansky, preparing to take refuge in Israel, turned over most of his responsibilities to his subordinate, Santo Trafficante, Jr. By this time Lansky was aging and in ill health. He was ready to move into retirement. 

In 1968—just two years earlier—Trafficante had journeyed to Saigon, Hong Kong and Singapore. It was there in the exotic East that he was solidifying the longtime relationship between Lansky and the CIA in the international drug racket. 

WHO'S THE BOSS? 

Here we turn once again to Professor Alfred McCoy for an elucidation of Lansky's ties with the CIA in the Southeast Asian drug racket and the covert part it played in the CIA's involvement in the Vietnam conflict. McCoy writes: 

"After Mafia kingpin Charles "Lucky" Luciano, was deported from the United States in 1946, he charged his longtime associate Meyer Lansky with the responsibility of managing his financial empire. Lansky also played a key role in organizing Luciano's heroin syndicate: he supervised smuggling operations, negotiated with Corsican heroin manufacturers, and managed the collection and concealment of the enormous profits 

"Lansky's control over the Caribbean and his relationship with the Florida-based Trafficante family were of particular importance, since many of the heroin shipments passed through Cuba or Florida on their way to America's urban markets. For almost twenty years the Luciano-Lansky-Trafficante partnership remained a major feature of the international heroin traffic." 392 

McCoy notes further: "There is reason to believe that Meyer Lansky's 1949-1950 European tour was instrumental in promoting Marseilles's heroin industry. After crossing the Atlantic in a luxury liner, Lansky visited Lucky]Luciano in Rome, where they discussed the narcotics trade. He then traveled to Zurich and contacted prominent Swiss bankers through John Pullman, an old friend from the rum running days. 

"These negotiations established the financial labyrinth that organized crime used for decades to smuggle its enormous gambling and heroin profits out of the country into numbered Swiss bank accounts without attracting the notice of the U.S. Internal Revenue Service. 

"Pullman was responsible for the European end of Lansky's financial operation: depositing, transferring, and investing the money when it arrived in Switzerland."393 

THE MOSSAD DRUG LINK 

As we noted in Chapter 7, Lansky biographer Hank Messick himself pointed out that, ultimately, Pullman's chief Swiss depository for Lansky's drug money was the Banque de Credit International (B.C.I), established in 1959. This bank, as we have seen, was the brainchild of longtime Israeli Mossad officer Tibor Rosenbaum. In Chapter 15 we shall examine the Lansky-Rosenbaum-BCI link to the JFK assassination in detail. 

According to Messick, "Once safely deposited in numbered accounts at B.C.I and other banks, it could be invested in the stock market or returned in the form of loans to individuals and corporations controlled by the National Crime Syndicate." 394 (Pullman, who had moved from Lansky's base in Miami beach to Montreal was Lansky's lieutenant in charge of that phase of the international drug operations.) 

THE CORSICAN MAFIA 

McCoy describes Lansky's European sojourn further: "After making the financial arrangements with Pullman in Switzerland, Lansky traveled through France, where he met with high-ranking Corsican syndicate leaders on the Riviera and in Paris. After lengthy discussions, Lansky and the Corsicans are reported to have arrived at some sort of agreement concerning the international heroin traffic. 

"Soon after Lansky returned to the United States, heroin laboratories began appearing in Marseilles. In future years, U.S. narcotics experts were to estimate that the majority of America's heroin supply was being manufactured in Marseilles.” 395 

McCoy notes that the European phase of the Lansky drug operations gradually began moving out of the hands of Lansky's associates in the Sicilian Mafia to the Marseilles area in France, under the domination of the Corsican Mafia. 396 

All of this took place at the same time Israel's friend in the American O.S.S (and later the CIA), James Angleton was engaged in the region, assisting the emigration of European Jews to Palestine. (In Chapter 8 we examined Angleton's role in these affairs further, including his links to the Corsican Mafia and to B.C.I founder Tibor Rosenbaum.) 

LANSKY, THE CIA AND 

THE CORSICAN MAFIA 

McCoy explains how the CIA had developed ties with Lansky's partners in the Corsican Mafia: "The CIA had sent agents and a psychological warfare team to Marseilles, where they dealt directly with Corsican syndicate leaders through the Guerini brothers Antoine and Barthelemy, leaders of the Corsican Mafia." 397 

The CIA's operatives supplied arms and money to Corsican gangs for assaults on Communist picket lines and harassment of important union officials. The communists had amassed much political clout in the region and the CIA utilized the Corsican Mafia to shatter the communists' strength. 

"The Guerinis gained enough power and status from their role in smashing the 1947 strike to emerge as the new leaders of the Corsican underworld. While the CIA was instrumental in restoring the Corsican underworld's political influence, it was not until the 1950 dock strike that the Guerinis gained enough power to take control of the Marseille waterfront. 

"The combination of political influence and control of the docks created the ideal environment for the growth of Marseilles's heroin laboratories— fortuitously at the same time that Mafia boss Lucky Luciano was seeking an alternative source of heroin supply." 398 

THE VIETNAMESE DRUG LINK 

As McCoy notes further, the CIA had also began flexing its muscles in Southeast Asia, where the drug trade originated. McCoy describes the CIA's relationship with the indigenous drug racketeers: 

"In Laos from 1960 to 1975, the CIA created a secret army of 30,000 Hmong tribesmen to battle Laotian Communists near the border with North Vietnam. Since the Hmong's main cash crop was opium, the CIA adopted a complicitous posture toward the traffic, allowing the Hmong commander, General Vang Po, to use the CIA's Air America to collect opium from his scattered highland villages. 

"In late 1969, the CIA's various covert action clients opened a network of heroin laboratories in the Golden Triangle. In their first years of operation, these laboratories exported high-grade no. 4 heroin to U.S. troops fighting in Vietnam. After their withdrawal, the Golden Triangle laboratories exported directly to the United States, capturing one-third of the American heroin market." 399 

Thus it was that the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate had developed a close working relationship with the CIA. 

Sam Giancana's family biographers stated flatly that Giancana claimed that in exchange for the underworld services of the Organized Crime Syndicate, "the CIA looked the other way—allowing over $100 million a year in illicit drugs to flow through Havana into the United States. 

"It was an arrangement similar to all the rest they'd made, he said. The CIA received 10 percent of the take on the sale of narcotics, which they utilized 'for their undercover slush fund.' Such illegally earned monies were stashed away by the CIA in Swiss, Italian, Bahamian, and Panamanian accounts." 400 

Further, according to the Giancanas, when Sam Giancana was engaged in various and sundry rackets he conventionally shared his profits with other Organized Crime bosses depending on the region or activity in question. "Largely," they pointed out, "Giancana's international deals involved Lansky and whomever else they needed to take care of at the time."401 

The two primary CIA figures in Southeast Asia during the time of the Lansky-CIA drug smuggling collaboration were, interestingly enough, Theodore Shackley and Thomas Clines. Shackley was chief of station for the CIA in Laos. Clines served as Shackley's immediate deputy. 402 

As we saw in Chapter 11, it was Shackley and Clines who had supervised the CIA's Operation Mongoose, the code name for the CIA/Lansky Crime Syndicate assassination plots against Castro, operating at a headquarters on the University of Miami campus. It was this operation that came to be known as JM/Wave. 

Operation Mongoose, it turns out, was under the direction of General Edward Lansdale whom, assassination researcher Bernard Fensterwald notes later "reportedly cultivated a close relationship with the Corsican Mafia during his controversial service in Vietnam." 403 

Interestingly enough, it was Shackley and Clines—upon "retiring" from the CIA who set up an arms dealing agency—the Egyptian Transport Service Company. 404 "This firm worked closely with Israel's Mossad figure Shaul Eisenberg's Aviation Trade and Service Company ." 405 Eisenberg, in fact, was a major player in Israel's nuclear arms development program—the very operation that created the crisis between John F. Kennedy and Israel. The plot clearly comes full circle. 

The role of Lansky in all of these activities, however, has been carefully ignored, even by writers—Alfred McCoy, the notable exception— who have exposed the CIA's role in the global drug racket. 

COVERING UP 

THE LANSKY CONNECTION 

In Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World, journalist Jonathan Kwitny takes several pages to outline the CIA-backed drug trafficking networks operating out of Southeast Asia and using the CIA allied Corsican crime families as a central distribution source. 

Kwitny points out the role of Charles "Lucky" Luciano in establishing the initial networks which also utilized the Sicilian crime families in the Mediterranean. Kwitny even acknowledges Alfred McCoy's work as "the best published documentation of all of this." 406

However, interestingly enough, Kwitny does not once mention Meyer Lansky's pivotal role in formally establishing the Luciano-launched global drug network, despite the fact that Kwitny cited McCoy as "the best published" source on the history of the drug network. Nor does Kwitny make reference to Santo Trafficante, Jr., Lansky's chief lieutenant and primary heir in the global drug racket. 

This is all particularly interesting when one realizes that in the recent furor over the JFK assassination conspiracy (resulting from the release of Oliver Stone's JFK film) that Kwitny himself is one of the primary promoters of the theory that "The Mafia Killed JFK." According to Kwitny, the principal architect of the crime was, by his estimation, more than likely New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello—who, as we have seen, was one of Lansky's local front men.407 Evidently Kwitny—like others who claim that "The Mafia Killed JFK"—doesn't want to acknowledge that Meyer Lansky even existed. 

It is also worth mentioning as well that Lansky's friendly biographer, Robert Lacey, writing in his 1991 biography of Lansky goes to great lengths to suggest that Lansky had no part in the international drug racket. This, as we have seen, is par for the course as far as Lacey's attitude toward Lansky is concerned. 

However, Rachel Ehrenfeld, one of the world's leading experts on the drug combine and its connections with global terrorism, writes in her book Evil Money that "there exists reliable evidence to the contrary. “ 408 

She cites an interview she conducted with a former congressional special investigator for organized crime. She reports that she was "reassured that the evidence for Lansky's illegal dealings was ample and that Lacey must have been the victim of his close dealings with Lansky's former associates and family."409 

FRENCH ASSASSINS? 

Considering the CIA's alliance with Lansky's allies in the Corsican Mafia, it is interesting to consider here that there are those who believe that the Corsican Mafia or other French elements may have played a role in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. There is evidence, indeed, that at least one French mercenary did show up in Dallas the day JFK was slain. 

Writing in Reasonable Doubt, Henry Hurt explores one aspect of the so-called "French connection" in some detail. He describes the possible role of a French OAS terrorist in the assassination. 

As we saw in Chapter 6 and in Chapter 9, the O.A.S was comprised of CIA-backed French forces who opposed granting independence to the French colony in Arab Algeria. This led them into direct confrontation with French President Charles DeGaulle who granted Algerian independence. 

As a member of the Senate, as we saw in Chapter 4, John F. Kennedy had called for Algerian independence, in opposition to the O.A.S. Israel itself had a stake in continued French domination of Algeria in that French occupation of Algeria was a direct obstacle in the path of Arab nationalism. (In Chapter 15 we will examine Israel's covert ties to the OAS.) 

Hurt cites a CIA document discovered in 1977 by Mary Ferrell, Dallas researcher: "The document, dated April 1, 1964, reported that the French intelligence service wanted help in locating one Jean Souetre, a French OAS terrorist considered a threat to the safety of French President Charles DeGaulle. 

"The document asserted that Jean Souetre was in Fort Worth, Texas, on the morning of November 22, 1963. That morning President Kennedy also was in Fort Worth. A few hours later, John F. Kennedy was in Dallas, where, at 12:30 p.m. he was assassinated. Also in Dallas that afternoon was Jean Souetre. 

"Within forty-eight hours of Kennedy's death, according to the query from the French, Jean Souetre was picked up by U.S. authorities in Texas. He was immediately expelled from the United States. French intelligence wanted to ascertain whether he was expelled to Canada or Mexico. 

"The French also wanted to know why the U.S. authorities had expelled Souetre. The simple purpose was to ensure the safety of President DeGaulle on his pending trip to Mexico." 410 

Hurt notes that the original document also noted that Souetre used the names Michel Roux and Michel Mertz. Roux happened to be in Fort Worth on November 22, having entered the country on November 19 and leaving at Laredo, Texas on December 6. He was not expelled. When questioned later, Souetre said that Mertz was an old enemy who often used his name and may have been trying to implicate him in misdeeds. 

THE HUNT CONNECTION 

Interestingly enough, it was CIA man E. Howard Hunt (whom we first met in Chapter 9) who was one of the CIA's point men in the dealings with Souetre and OAS intelligence 411 That the two may have been in Dallas— perhaps even together—during the time of the JFK assassination is intriguing, to say the very least and yet another of the details that, taken together, demonstrate continuing intimate connections between persons and institutions that have (elsewhere) been repeatedly linked to the JFK assassination conspiracy. 

In Chapter 15 and Chapter 16 we shall see that Israeli Mossad/ Lansky-- linked elements in New Orleans and elsewhere funneled money to the O.A.S for a 1962 assassination attempt against Charles DeGaulle and that, indeed, these same elements are tied directly to the JFK assassination. 

TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN 

Professor Alfred McCoy summarizes the covert links between the CIA and organized crime around the world: 

"Since prohibition of narcotics in the 1920's, alliances between drug brokers and intelligence agencies have protected the global narcotics traffic.

Given the frequency of such alliances, there seems a natural attraction between intelligence agencies and criminal syndicates . . . Both are practitioners of what one retired CIA operative has called the 'clandestine arts'—the basic skill of operating outside the normal channels of civil society. Among all the institutions of modern society, intelligence agencies and criminal syndicates alone maintain large organizations capable of carrying out covert operations without fear of detection." 412 

Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana's family biographers have written of Giancana's own elaboration on this relationship. They described how Giancana showed his brother an ancient Roman coin and declared: "Look, this is one of the Roman gods. This one has two faces . . . two sides. That's what we are, the Outfit and the CIA—two sides of the same coin: 413 

ISRAEL, THE CIA AND 

THE DRUG COMBINE 

All the evidence we have covered here suggests that the CIA and the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate were indeed partners in many areas of mutual concern—not only in Cuba and in the Southeast Asian drug racket—but also in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. 

And as we saw in Chapter 6, Lansky's allies in Israel stood much to benefit from American involvement in Southeast Asia. 

While Israel was using America's engagement in and preoccupation with the Vietnam conflict as a means whereby Israel could flex its muscle in the Middle East, the Lansky narcotics network was using its partnership with the CIA during the Vietnam War as a cover for its drug-smuggling. 

And as we have seen in Chapter 8, the CIA and Israel itself had long and close ties equally as incestuous of those of the Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate and Israel. That Israel had its own difficulties with John F. Kennedy we have already seen. Likewise with the Mafia and the Lansky Syndicate. In Chapter 9 we reviewed the CIA's own problems with John F. Kennedy. Clearly, this alliance of forces against JFK was such that there was really no way John F. Kennedy could have ever completed his first term in the White House.

Chapter Thirteen 

Israel's California Connection: 

Mickey Cohen and the 

JFK Assassination Conspiracy 

The role of Meyer Lansky's West Coast Henchman — longtime Israeli loyalist Mickey Cohen—in the JFK assassination conspiracy is one of history's little-known stories. Cohen — who was one of Jack Ruby's idols — apparently had a direct hand in the initial stages of Israeli machinations against John F. Kennedy. Evidence suggests also that the death of film actress Marilyn Monroe was linked, in fact, to the Israeli connection in the JFK assassination conspiracy. 

When Mickey Cohen's name has appeared in numerous books and monographs relating to the JFK murder, it has only been in passing. Cohen, it would appear on the surface, deserves mention if only because of his involvement in Organized Crime which figures so prominently in JFK conspiracy theories. 

However, Cohen's intimate involvement with Israel and its international intrigue, and Cohen's dedication to advancing Israel's interests—even at the expense of his own criminal money-making activities—needs to be examined further. 

The evidence we shall examine here suggests that even the death of film actress Marilyn Monroe is indeed linked to the John F. Kennedy assassination in a way never imagined. 

Cohen, as we shall see, was using Miss Monroe—one of John F. Kennedy's illicit liaisons—as a conduit to learn Kennedy's intentions toward Israel. There is a lot more to the story of Marilyn Monroe's affair with JFK than the tabloids have told us. 

COHEN'S MEMOIRS 

The primary source on Mickey Cohen is the Los Angeles mobster's own colorful memoirs. Cohen's memoir—Mickey Cohen: In My Own Words—is one of the more fascinating first-hand accounts of life in Organized Crime. The memoir is particularly interesting for three specific reasons: 

(a) it is one of the few autobiographical accounts of life in Organized Crime written by a non-Italian. Virtually all of the popular accounts of life in the mob come from former "Mafia" members or associates. Cohen— with the exception of Michael Milan, whom we first met in Chapter 7—is perhaps the only other non-Italian, non-Mafia Organized Crime leader to put his experiences in writing. 

(b) Cohen, as Hollywood's rackets boss, was a central player in that unique underworld that links the entertainment industry to Organized Crime.

A friend and associate of the prominent and of the rich and powerful, Cohen knew where Hollywood's bodies were buried, in more ways than one. 

(c) Cohen's "ghost-writer,"—the man who put Cohen's sometimes inelegant ramblings together and edited them for publication—was John Peer Nugent. 

THE CIA CONNECTION 

A former correspondent for Newsweek, Nugent was—on one occasion— taken into custody while in Africa on suspicion of being a CIA agent. He was released through the personal intervention of then-Secretary of State Dean Rusk. However, according to organized crime authority Art Kunkin, Nugent did have CIA connections. 414 

Interestingly enough, Nugent himself once participated in a debate with JFK assassination investigator, A. J. Weberman, co-author of Coup d'Etat in America, where he—Nugent—sought to refute CIA complicity in the JFK assassination. 

In this context, one can't help but wonder if Cohen's memoirs weren't a laundered version, CIA-style. 

Both what does appear in Cohen's reminiscences—and what doesn't appear—are equally intriguing. Cohen's memoirs are a gold-mine of often fascinating information, particularly in regard to the Hollywood mobster's early links to Israel and its birth struggle. 

SUCCESSOR TO SIEGEL 

Cohen was the West Coast successor to Meyer Lansky's ill-fated boyhood crony, Benjamin Siegel, Organized Crime's top man on the West Coast until his bloody assassination on June 20, 1947. Remembered best as "the man who invented Las Vegas," the handsome Siegel was shot dead in the Beverly Hills home of his second wife, mob playgirl Virginia Hill. 

Lansky and Siegel were longtime friends and early partners in Brooklyn at the beginning of their initial reach into the upper echelons of Organized Crime. The oft-told tales of New York's "Bug and Meyer Mob" are legendary in the annals of Organized Crime. "Bug and Meyer" were treacherous killers in those early years. There's no reason to think that Lansky mellowed with age. 

Believed by Organized Crime's ruling commission of looting funds earmarked for the casino network he was establishing in Las Vegas on behalf of the syndicate, Siegel was slain in retribution for his betrayal. This was said to be a great personal loss for his friend, Lansky. 

LANSKY ORDERS THE HIT 

Yet, Lansky himself apparently agreed to the decision that Siegel had to be executed. Lansky even agreed to handle the arrangements if necessary Apparently he did. "I had no choice," Lansky later said, reflecting upon his friend's betrayal and its consequences. 415 

(The best accounts of Siegel's role in the development of the Las Vegas front for the Lansky Crime Syndicate appear in The Green Felt Jungle by Ed Reid and Ovid Demaris and We Only Kill Each Other, a biography of Siegel written by Dean Jennings). 

HOOVER SENDS HIS SYMPATHIES 

In Chapter 7 we explored the FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover's seeming inability to acknowledge the existence of the Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate as well as Hoover's connections to Israel's American-based intelligence and propaganda agency, the Lansky Syndicate-financed Anti Defamation League (A.D.L) of B'nai B'rith. (We shall discuss the A.D.L in further detail in Chapter 17.) 

Michael Milan (whom we first met in Chapter 7 as a mutual associate of both Hoover and Lansky) says that when the hit was ordered on Ben Siegel, "Even J. Edgar Hoover himself had to concur and told everybody to stand away. He sent Meyer Lansky his personal condolences, however, because he had liked Benny, and Benny had showed him a good time whenever he went to the Coast."416 

Whatever the circumstances, it was, in fact Mickey Cohen who assumed Siegel's position as Lansky's West Coast representative upon Siegel's assassination. 

LANSKY'S 'EYES AND EARS' 

According to Lansky's biographer, Hank Messick, it was Cohen who was Lansky's real "eyes and ears" in Southern California—not his good friend Siegel. One of Cohen's primary responsibilities was keeping an eye on the free-wheeling and reckless Siegel on Lansky's behalf. 

When Siegel was removed from the scene it was Cohen who stepped in and took charge of Lansky's West Coast affairs—quite a fortuitous set of circumstances for the simian thug who could —by no means—ever have competed with Siegel in a beauty contest. No wonder then that Cohen recalled in his memoirs, "I have a great love and respect and a complete high regard for Meyer Lansky." 417 

COHEN & ISRAEL 

Aside, however, from his direct ties to Lansky, and his own intra-mob machinations, Mickey Cohen was in the State of Israel's camp from the very beginning of its existence—even before. By his own admission, Cohen was engaged in arms smuggling and fund-raising for Israel even before Israel had become a state.

In his memoirs Cohen recalls his first encounter with an agent of Israel's international fund-raising and arms-smuggling operations and how he came to identify with Israel's cause. 

Speaking of his crony, Mike Howard, Cohen recounted the day that Howard introduced him to an Israeli operative. (In his memoirs Cohen does not name the Israeli in question.) Howard, he says, "knew that I would do anything for a cause that was right, and particularly Jewish causes." 418 

At first, Cohen says, he was hesitant to become involved. He changed his mind, though. "So they come back," Cohen recalled, "and we sit down to talk. And the guy tells me this story about the Haganah, which was organized by the David Ben-Gurion guy. And he tells me especially about the Irgun and the type of war they're fighting against the British, and the type of guys they are and all this. And I got high on him." 

But you know when you're kinky [i.e. criminally-oriented] your mind runs kinky. I still figured this must be a racket thing. So I says to the guy, Tookit, I don't know nothing about these things. I didn't even know there was a war going on in Israel. Let me think it over.” 419 

Cohen made no decision, one way or the other, but after Hollywood screenwriter, publicist and playwright Ben Hecht—an ardent advocate of the Zionist cause—came visiting, Cohen began to see the light. Hecht appeared at Cohen's headquarters accompanied by a representative of the bloody terrorist Irgun gang. The individual, once again, Cohen did not name. "I could see that I was dealing with a real man, no con guy," 420 remembered Cohen. 

MENACHEM BEGIN COMES TO TOWN 

In his own memoirs Jimmy ("the Weasel") Fratianno, a top West Coast Mafia figure-turned-government informant, gives us a hint as to who Cohen's Irgun friend may have been. Fratianno described a benefit for Israel at an exclusive Bel Air home: 

"After [Cohen's] little speech, we start moving around the room and Mickey's rabbi introduces us to a guy called Menachem Begin, who's the boss of the Irgun, an underground outfit in Palestine. This guy's wearing a black armband and he tells us he's wanted back there for bombing a hotel that killed almost a hundred people. He's a fucking lamster [i.e. on the run]. 

"Anyway, he makes a speech, and after him just about everybody made a speech. It just goes on and on. Afterwards these other guys from the Haganah, another underground outfit, start arguing with Begin about who's going to handle the money. So Mickey chirps in and it's agreed that his rabbi will handle the money and Mickey will buy guns and ammo and ship them over there." 421 

[This, as we shall see, would not be the last time that Menachem Begin would be spotted in the company of Mickey Cohen, however.] 

Fratianno frankly doubted Cohen's sincerity and suspected that Cohen was in "the cause" for the money to be made. However, in his own memoirs, Cohen was insistent about his dedication to Israel. In fact, he goes on at length about his devotion. 

"I got engrossed with the goddamn thing pretty strong see. Through my connections I made everybody throughout the country—the Italians, the Jews, the Irish—set up whatever positions there were to be helpful to the Israel cause." 422 

DEDICATED TO ISRAEL 

Cohen's dedication was inestimable. He was so devoted to Israel, indeed, that he allowed his criminal activities to go by the wayside. Cohen says: 

"Now I got so engrossed with Israel that I actually pushed aside a lot of my activities and done nothing but what was involved with this Irgun war. It's a nature of mine, see. Either I go whole hog or nothing. So I got involved with this goddamn Israel war for three years. I started to have relationships with Irgun members back in Israel. They got to understand me better and I got to understand them better. 

"Well, I had raised considerable money, not particularly myself, but through me, throughout the country. There were dinners held in Boston, Philadelphia, Miami. And plenty of armament and equipment was collected that you couldn't possibly get. 

"It was only God's will that Harry Truman was President. He couldn't openly allow it to be known that he was okaying stuff to be shipped back there or that stuff was being stolen from the ships that were coming back from the Second World War. 

"But it was only with Truman's looking the other way, or with his being in favor, that it was done. To me, he was the greatest man in the world, Harry Truman, because of what he done for Israel and because he made it available for us to do. 

"We were able to get on ships that were being put into mothballs. I had access to all that stuff on the docks. Some of the stuff and equipment like machine guns that we got back to Israel had never got a chance to be used in the Second World War. They weren't even put together. They were still in the cases, in the straw, in the oil and everything. We shipped them right over." 423 

JACK RUBY COMES TO TOWN 

It was during this same time that Cohen was also making the acquaintance of another thug, Jack Rubinstein, who ultimately changed his last name to Ruby. 

Gary Wean—whose business it was to keep an eye on Cohen's activities—later put his fascinating experiences down in an informal memoir entitled There's a Fish in the Courthouse. 

Wean's contributions to Kennedy assassination research, however, have not received the widespread recognition they deserve.

A detective sergeant for the Los Angeles Police Department, Wean got to know Mickey Cohen well. What's more, as a Criminal Intelligence Investigator for the Los Angeles District Attorney's Bureau of Investigation, Wean was privy to much "inside" information about Cohen and his activities in Hollywood. Later, Wean was chief investigator for the Ventura County Public Defenders Office until 1970. He is now retired. 

In his memoirs, Wean says he saw Ruby twice in Hollywood in 1946 and in 1947. The first time Ruby was riding with Cohen in Cohen's big black limousine, although, on that occasion, they were not introduced.424 The second time he encountered Ruby was a year later. According to Wean, he and his partner went to a club known as Harry's Place. Ruby was there, and Wean introduced himself and informed Ruby he was a police officer. 

In turn, Ruby introduced himself. He said: "My name is Jack Ruby. I just came out from Chicago to get with Harry. Since the war's over the West Coast is dead, so is Chicago, We're moving 'everything' to New Orleans and Miami. That is where all the action is going to be from now, between the United States and Cuba." 425 

A New Orleans chief assistant district attorney has essentially confirmed Ruby's claim that the Crescent City had become a hub of syndicate financing and activity. According to the prosecutor, "There is too much money here. We feel that it's flowing in from other Cosa Nostra [Mafia] organizations in other parts of the country for investment by the local mobs. This could be their financial center, with a lot of nice safe places where campaign contributions and outright bribery have pretty well insulated them from the law." 426 

In any case, as we shall see, this was just the beginning of Jack Ruby's relationship with Mickey Cohen and Cohen's West Coast associates. It wasn't until 1963, however, that the relationship came full circle, as we shall see in Chapter 14. 

COHEN, MARILYN MONROE AND JFK 

By 1960, Cohen was an established power in the West Coast syndicate operations of Meyer Lansky. And Cohen was also a key figure in Hollywood, nurturing his relationships with the film colony there—for his own insidious purposes. 

As author John Davis notes: "One of Cohen's rackets was sexually compromising Hollywood stars for the purpose of blackmail. It had been Cohen who engineered the torrid affair between his accomplice, Johnny Stompanato, and film star Lana Turner, in the hope of getting pictures of the two in bed together." 427 [Miss Turner's daughter later killed Stompanato in an event that became a major Hollywood scandal.] 

But Cohen's activities went further. Cohen was also manipulating beautiful screen star Marilyn Monroe for yet another purpose—one which had international implications. 

Now as the legend goes, it was ostensibly the Frank Sinatra connection that led to the introduction of Marilyn Monroe to John F. Kennedy However, according to Gary Wean, it was in fact the Mickey Cohen connection that brought the handsome Massachusetts Senator and the Hollywood sex symbol together. 

Wean reveals that Cohen's close friend, entertainer Joey Bishop—who also happened to be a member of Sinatra's famous clique known as "the rat pack"—was the one who actually set up the circumstances that led to the initial liaison between JFK and Miss Monroe during the 1960 presidential campaign. 

"It was Joey Bishop that came up with the 'idea of a wild party' for Kennedy. He talked Peter Lawford, JFK's brother-in-law into it."428 According to Wean, there was a reason for all of this—beyond satisfying JFK's notorious appetite for beautiful women: "Bishop knew Kennedy would be taken by the Monroe sex appeal. Bishop was a Jew and real tight with Cohen. 

"At that time the rabbis were pushing them hard as hell to squeeze every bit of dough they could get out of Hollywood for Israel. Menachem Begin was spending more time hanging around Cohen in Hollywood than in Israel. Begin desperately wanted to know what Kennedy's plan was for Israel if he became president. 

"Cohen figured if they could duke Marilyn into Kennedy, Cohen's pimp Georgie Piscitelli would be able to manipulate her and tell them everything Kennedy told her. Also they'd work a blackmail squeeze against JFK if a romance blossomed. Cohen also had something going on with Jack Ruby. His girl friend, a stripper by the name of Candy Barr, was making a lot of trips between Ruby in Dallas and Cohen in Hollywood."429 

According to Wean, Cohen's pimp was also sleeping with Miss Monroe. Wean learned this from a young lady named Mary Mercandante who was jealous of Piscitelli's relationship with Miss Monroe. Miss Mercandante was a prostitute and Piscitelli was her pimp. 

JFK'S VIEWS TOWARD ISRAEL? 

It was from Miss Mercandante that Wean learned something which he came to describe as "the really weird stuff." 430 Miss Mercandante told Wean that Piscitelli's job was to pump Miss Monroe for information about JFK's views toward Israel. (As we have seen in Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, Israel and its American lobby were uneasy, to say the very least, about Kennedy.) However, according to Wean, Piscitelli told Miss Mercandante that Marilyn would get upset when he began pressing her, saying she didn't know anything about politics. Wean reports that Miss Mercandante told him that: "Cohen got mad and told Georgie to stick with Marilyn and pour drinks or pills down her, whatever it takes and find out what John Kennedy intended to do about financing Israel."431 

According to Wean's source: "Cohen and Begin were plenty upset over Kennedy's plans to give billions of dollars to the Peace Corps, and the South American and African countries." 432

Miss Mercandante began threatening to reveal all she knew about Cohen's manipulation of the film actress and the affair with Kennedy. Wean, however, had already reported his findings to his superiors. 

TWO MURDERS? 

Miss Mercandante was later murdered. She appears to be yet another of the many victims of what ultimately evolved into the JFK assassination conspiracy and cover-up. 

Now although there has long been widespread suspicion that Marilyn Monroe was herself perhaps murdered, the tabloids would have us believe that she was murdered by the Kennedy family to keep silent about her affair with the President and—allegedly also—his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. 

The evidence we have seen here, however, suggests that if Miss Monroe was murdered it indeed was to keep her silent—but for an entirely different reason. 

If Miss Monroe ever revealed that Mickey Cohen had used her to find out Kennedy's stance toward Israel, it would have opened a Pandora's Box that could have exposed Israel's uneasy relationship with JFK—something that Israel and its American lobby could not afford. 

What is interesting is that in his memoirs—which are filled with Cohen's incessant name-dropping and accounts of his friendships with a bevy of Hollywood figures—Cohen never once mentions Marilyn Monroe. Nor does he mention Jack Ruby, for that matter either. 

There were evidently certain things that Cohen and his co-author did not see fit to mention. It is more than interesting to note, at least in passing, that Meyer Lansky himself had "inside" knowledge on the extra-marital affairs of Attorney General Robert Kennedy at the very least. 

According to J. Edgar Hoover biographer Curt Gentry, Lansky was overheard on a federal wiretap on August 1, 1962 telling his wife, Teddy, that Robert Kennedy was carrying on an affair with a woman in El Paso, Texas. 433 

WHAT WERE THEY UP TO? 

In any event, Mickey Cohen's strange activities were of continuing particular interest to Gary Wean. 

Wean described in his memoirs how he first discovered the close working relationship between Cohen and Israeli terrorist-turned-roving diplomat (and later Israeli Prime Minister) Menachem Begin, whose Hollywood activities we reviewed earlier in this chapter: 

"My partner and I'd been watching Mickey Cohen from a distance. We knew he was up to something out of the ordinary. He spent a lot of time with a weird-looking little guy at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel lunch counter and drug store area.

"What got our curiosity most was Mickey seemed to be taking orders from the stranger. We got photos with our telescopic lens of Cohen and his friend. The office checked it out. We learned his name: Menachem Begin."434 

To find out further what Cohen and Begin were involved with, Wean deployed a Yiddish-speaking spy to listen in on Cohen and Begin's conversations. Wean notes: "He reported that the two in a deep discussion were very excitable. There was a lot of talk about Cuba and military operations and the Kennedy's."435 According to Wean's operative: "We've really got something going. Mickey sounded like a politician. They were going on about war and billion dollar appropriations, cursing JFK about his crazy Peace Corps and wasting money." 436 

MELVIN BELLI 

According to Wean, after this coffee shop conference, Cohen and Begin departed. Wean and his partner followed Cohen to an elegant home in Los Angeles. There, Wean says, Cohen and Begin met with high-priced lawyer Melvin Belli, Cohen's longtime friend and attorney. 437 

Belli, we shall see in Chapter 14, came to play an important role in the tangled web of intrigue surrounding the Kennedy assassination. Belli served as attorney for Jack Ruby. 

Interestingly enough, according to Wean, Cohen, Ruby and Menachem Begin shared one other thing in common: Cohen was sharing his girlfriend, stripper Candy Barr, with not only Ruby (then operating in Dallas), but also with Begin, Israel's man in Hollywood.438 

However, Mickey Cohen had a lot more on his mind than his criminal activities and his sexual pursuits. Cohen was interested in the survival of Israel, the nation he had helped establish. 

COHEN'S MISSION 

Cohen's peculiar interest in JFK's Middle East policy, coupled with his unfortunate manipulation of Marilyn Monroe, along with his longtime devotion to the Zionist cause, places him squarely in the midst of the Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate's central part in the JFK assassination conspiracy. 

The simian-like Los Angeles thug was very much privy to the circumstances of what really took place in the JFK assassination. What Cohen may have known, however, was lost forever when the Lansky henchman died suddenly of a heart attack. He had no known history of heart trouble. In Chapter 14 we shall examine Cohen's connection with Jack Ruby in more detail. 

Years after his encounter with Cohen and Begin, Gary Wean received what he described as "a strange call." It was from a writer named Ed Tivnan who said he was looking into Begin's alleged association with American gangsters.

COVERING FOR ISRAEL 

"My book's purpose is to deny, dispel and silence the accusations of Begin's criminal associations with them," 439 said Tivnan. Tivnan was not interested in Wean's account of Begin's very real association with the Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate. It was something that Israel did not want told. [cannot undo what really happened and Begin is and was a terrorist who had dealings with Americans gangsters for weapons and raising money for the Zionist cause! DC]

There is another interesting sidelight to all of this. When author Anthony Summers was preparing his book Goddess, a life of Marilyn Monroe, he contacted Wean for information and Wean provided Summers with all of the details we've reviewed in these pages. 

However, when Summers' biography of Miss Monroe finally hit the bookstores, the author had nothing to say about Cohen and the Israeli connection. Instead, the book suggested that Miss Monroe's death was a proximate result of her affair with the Kennedy brothers. 

Indeed, the book led the reader to believe that it was the Kennedy's who were, one way or the other, responsible—directly or indirectly—for the young woman's tragic death. The Mickey Cohen-Israel connection went unmentioned. 

There is something else interesting. This same Anthony Summers is the Anthony Summers who wrote an exhaustive study of the JFK assassination entitled Conspiracy. (This was before he met with Wean.) However, when Summers released an up-dated edition of his book in 1992, he never reported the information that Wean provided him about the Israeli connection. It is likely, in all fairness to Summers, that he probably did not understand the significance of what he had learned. However, it is very clear, considering everything that we have already examined in these pages—and what we are about to examine—that Wean's discovery was a key to understanding what really happened on November 22, 1963. 

THE COHEN CONNECTION 

Today, there are those, as we have seen, who continually cite Jack Ruby's connections with organized crime as proof that "The Mafia Killed JFK." Some have even pointed out that one of Ruby's first telephone calls he made immediately after the JFK assassination (just shortly after Lee Harvey Oswald had been arrested) was to Al Gruber, a Mickey Cohen associate in Hollywood. 

Gruber, it also turns out—perhaps not surprisingly—was associated with Lansky's Mexico City syndicate drug-smuggling connection, "Happy" Meltzer, with whom, as we shall see in Chapter 14, Ruby had his own connections. 440 

In fact, although Ruby had not seen Gruber in some ten years, Gruber came to visit Ruby in Dallas in November of 1963, just shortly before the assassination.

Other than this, the Cohen-Ruby link is given little play—perhaps precisely because it points not in the direction of the Mafia, but instead, more directly to Israel and the Meyer Lansky Organized Crime Syndicate. 

As it stands, ironically enough, Mickey Cohen was already incarcerated in federal prison by the time of the JFK assassination. Lansky's West Coast lieutenant was one of many "big names" snared in the Kennedy war against the Lansky crime syndicate. There was clearly no love lost between Mickey Cohen and the Kennedy brothers. 

It seems likely—and Gary Wean believes, as he told this author—that Cohen's henchman Gruber was the intermediary for the Lansky syndicate in the delicate matter of how to silence the patsy—Oswald—who had somehow escaped being killed and was then in the custody of the Dallas police. 

Mickey Cohen and Menachem Begin very clearly were involved in the initial stages of what ultimately evolved into the JFK assassination conspiracy precisely because of Kennedy's difficult foreign policy struggle with Israel which sparked the plot against the American president. 

Perhaps this might explain why Jack Ruby—in his final days—was fearful that if the truth about the assassination of John F. Kennedy ever came out that, as Ruby put it, "the Jews" would be blamed for the crime.441 

In the next chapter we will examine Jack Ruby's role further and consider his connections with the Lansky syndicate—and with Israel.

next
The Errand Boy: 
Jack Ruby Was More "Mossad" Than "Mafia"

notes
Chapter Twelve An Opiate for the Masses 385 Scott, p. 71. 386 Alfred McCoy. The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991), pp. 40-41. 
387 Hank Messick. Lansky. (New York: Berkley Medallion Books, 1971), pp. 210-211. 
388 Ibid. 
389 Dan Moldea. The Hoffa Wars: Teamsters, Rebels, Politicians and the Mob, (New York: Paddington Press Ltd., 1978), p. 123. 
390 Messick, p. 215. 
391 Ibid. 
392 McCoy, p. 40. 
393 Ibid., pp. 44-45.  
394 Messick, p. 199. 
395 McCoy, Ibid. 
396 Ibid., pp. 64-65. 
397 Ibid., pp. 60-61. 
398 Ibid. 
399 Ibid. p. 19. 
400 Sam Giancana and Chuck Giancana. Double Cross: The Explosive Inside Story of the Mobster Who Controlled America. (New York: Warner Books, 1992), p. 259. 
401 Ibid., p. 258. 
402 McCoy, p. 462. 
403 Bernard Fensterwald and the Committee to Investigate Assassinations. Coincidence or Conspiracy? (New York: Zebra Books, 1977), p. 187. 
404 McCoy, p. 477. 
405 Executive Intelligence Review. Project Democracy: The 'Parallel Government' Behind the Iran-Contra Affair. (Washington, D.C.: EIR News Service, 1987), p. 287. 
406 Jonathan Kwitny. Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World. (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 331. 
407 The Wall Street Journal, December 19, 1991. 
408 Rachel Ehrenfeld. Evil Money: Encounters Along the Money Trail. (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1992), p. 259. 
409 Ibid. 
410 Henry Hurt. Reasonable Doubt: An Investigation into the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1985), pp. 417-419. 
411 Dick Russell. The Man Who Knew Too Much. (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc., 1992), p. 563 
412 McCoy, p. 14 
413 Giancana, p. 215. 

Chapter Thirteen Israel's California Connection 
414 A. J. Weberman writing in The Yipster Times (no date available) 
415 Hank Messick. Lansky. (New York: Berkley Medallion Books, 1971), p. 153. 
416 Michael Milan. The Squad: The U.S. Government's Secret Alliance With Organized Crime. (New York: Shapolsky Publishers, Inc., 1989), p. 195. 
417 Mickey Cohen with John Peer Nugent. Mickey Cohen: In My Own Words. (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1975), p. 82. 
418 Ibid., p. 90. 419 Ibid. 
420 Ibid., p. 91. 
421 Ovid Demaris. The Last Mafioso. (New York: Bantam Books, 1981), p. 32. 
422 Cohen, Ibid. 
423 Ibid., pp. 91-92. 
424 Gary L. Wean. There's a Fish in the Courthouse. (Oak View, California: Casitas Books, 1987), p. 681. 
425 Ibid. 
426 Robert Morrow. The Senator Must Die: The Murder of Robert F. Kennedy. (Santa Monica, California: Roundtable Publishing, Inc., 1988), p. 16. 
427 John Davis. Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy (New York: McGraw-Hill Publishing Co., 1989), p. 239. 
428 Wean, pp. 678-679. 
429 Ibid., p. 679. 
430 Ibid., p. 677. 
431 Ibid., 
432 Ibid. 
433 Curt Gentry, J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets. (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1991), p. 493. 434 Wean, pp. 687-688. 
435 Ibid., p. 688. 
436 Ibid., p. 689. 437 Ibid. 
438 Ibid. 
439 Ibid., p. 739. 
440 Peter Dale Scott. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1993), p. 143. 
441 Ramparts (No date available).