Facebook
Fark
Digg
Reddit
Stumble
G. Robert Blakey speaks about the President John F. Kennedy assassination in a video being played at the Mob Museum in downtown Las Vegas Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2012.
By Tovin Lapan (contact) 
Thursday, Nov. 22, 2012 | 2 a.m.
Forty-nine years ago today, on Nov. 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza.
The assassination and subsequent slaying of shooter Lee Harvey Oswald shocked the country. In the five decades since, the assassination continues to capture the imagination of authors, filmmakers and the public. It has sparked hundreds of conspiracy theories and studies into who — if not Oswald — was behind Kennedy’s slaying.
Robert Blakey, an attorney who served in the Justice Department in the 1960s and worked on drafting the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act, served on the House Select Committee on Assassinations that was established in 1976 to investigate the assassinations of both Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.
Unlike the earlier Warren Commission, which found Oswald acted alone, the House committee concluded its two-year investigation with a report stating Kennedy’s assassination was likely the result of a conspiracy.
Much of the evidence tied to the report was sealed from the public for 50 years. The committee specifically noted that it did not believe the conspiracy was orchestrated by the Soviet Union, Cuba, an organized crime group or any anti-Fidel Castro group but that the involvement of individual members of any of those groups could not be ruled out.
The committee consisted of 13 congressmen; Blakey served as its chief counsel and staff director from 1977 to 1979. Blakey helped draft the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 and later wrote a book about the assassination, “The Plot to Kill the President.”
Blakey, in Las Vegas on Nov. 13 for a lecture at the Mob Museum, sat down with the Sun for an interview about his knowledge of the assassination.
One of the things the House select committee did was review the investigations conducted at the time, including by the FBI, CIA and, later, the Warren Commission. What stuck out to you?
First of all it was not a (federal) crime at that time to shoot the president, except for it being murder. So the FBI had to have a predicate in order to do an investigation. (One of the) bullets hit the car, and that’s destruction of government property. So, the whole Kennedy investigation (by the FBI) was premised on the ... destruction of government property, but that meant that the people who (oversaw) it in the bureau were from the property desk, not organized crime, and not the security people. The organized crime people were in a position to look into it, and they were never asked. They were never tasked with the investigation, and I couldn’t believe it.
You worked on the legislation that allowed for electronic surveillance, which eventually led to federal wiretaps on suspected members of organized crime. What did you learn about the connections between politics and organized crime?
One of the taps was set up in the Westside Democratic Club in Chicago, and they heard the whole story of what was actually going on in a phone conversation that’s really interesting. It’s a conversation between (organized crime boss) Sam Giancana and the mob there and Roland Libonati, a congressman. They are discussing how many votes Libonati should hit in the next election, how much he should win by.
So Libonati says: ‘Well I want it to look a little better than that, I want it to look like a close race.”
What were your thoughts about the Kennedy assassination before you started work on the committee?
A lot of people working on investigating the assassination spent a lot of their time looking for a conspiracy. When I started work on the assassinations committee, I did not think the mob did it. I thought it would be too high of a risk factor for them, and I knew (FBI Director J. Edgar) Hoover had electronic surveillance on them.
I said to myself: ‘I’ll be a hero to the mob. I’ll prove they didn’t do it by getting all this surveillance.’
So I got, I think, (information from) six months before and eight months after the (assassination), and the next thing you know they start talking about whacking the president.
What were some of the more interesting things you heard?
There is one conversation in Philadelphia where assassination is mentioned and (Philadelphia organized crime boss) Angelo Bruno says: ‘No, no. We don’t do that.’ And he tells the old Sicilian story about what happens when you take a prince out. You get his son, and the son is worse than the prince. So you live with what we have, and that was the message.
That changed over time. It was very clear they were talking about it. They were thinking about it and they were very angry about it, and particularly they were angry with Kennedy and the reason they were angry with Kennedy is twofold. Giancana had gotten him votes in Chicago, and then what did he do? He put Bobby Kennedy in (as attorney general) and sicced him on them. That’s not good.
And, there were romantic relationships between John Kennedy … well there were romantic relationships between Kennedy and everybody.
There were two John Kennedys. There was the public John Kennedy, which everybody admires, and then there is the guy who is sick when it comes to women. But he had a relationship with a woman who was … also associated with Sam Giancana.
What conclusions did you come to after it was all over?
I think the mob set Oswald up as a patsy. It’s not that I think (Oswald) didn’t shoot (Kennedy), but that I think he was set up so (investigators) would focus on the Cuban connections (and not the mob). Did the mob do it? I don’t know for sure, but it explains more of the evidence than anything else.
You were a part of the Justice Department when Robert Kennedy was attorney general and vigorously went after organized crime. What happened after John F. Kennedy’s death?
Whether the mob killed Kennedy or not I couldn’t tell you, but they were the one element of society that profited the most by the assassination, because the (federal government’s) organized crime program basically collapsed.
We may never know who the actual killers of Pres.Kennedy were.It has been said that the mob and the CIA may have worked together on this Assassination conspiracy.Whether true or not,is anyone's guess.
It has been mentioned that FBI director J.Edger Hoover has said that there is no such thing as a nationwide criminal organization (mafia) in the U.S. while he was director of the FBI at that time.
It was not until the Appalachian gangland conference on Nov.14,1957 in Appalchia, New York. Attended by the heads of Mafia families from across the country. It was then that FBI director J. Edger Hoover finally admitted that organized crime did infact exist in the U.S.
Pres.Kennedy was ahead of his time.Had he not been assassinated on Nov.22,1963 the world would have been in far better shape today because of him. The rest as they say is history.
A single malcontent individual, starved for attention, starved for being "known" had motive, means and opportunity. In 50 years not one person who was a part of this so called conspiracy has been outed. Oswalds own brother who probably knew him better than anyone else stated he did not see any evidence of a conspiracy. There have been no verifiable death bed confessions. The American population just can't accept a lone gunman but when you put everything together, it's really the only logical explanation. The Oliver Stones of this world have perpetrated a lie that won't die. It should.
Sadly, a bonafied forensic investigation was not undertaken. This has resulted in too many unanswered questions. The Warren Commission was very disappionting and shed very little light on this tragic event. Now with most of the participents deceased the truth will be hard to ascertain. Re-enforcing the adage, "The best way to keep a secret among three people, is if two are dead."
Obviously the Kennedy clan ticked-off some determined ruthless folks during their power trips -- failed attempt(s) to assassinate Castro -- criminal inquisitions into organized crime and unions, etc"resulting in their comeuppance?
Of course JFK's assassination involved a conspiracy as well as a government cover-up.
: {
"Sometimes people sort of glaze over about the notion that the Mafia and U.S. intelligence and the anti-Castro activists were involved together in the assassination of President Kennedy. In fact, there's no contradiction there. Those three groups were all in bed together at the time and had been for several years in the fight to topple Fidel Castro." --Anthony Summers
"In retrospect, the reason for the assassination is hardly a mystery. It is now abundantly clear ... why the C.I.A.'s covert operations element wanted John Kennedy out of the Oval Office and Lyndon Johnson in it. The new President elevated by rifle fire to control of our foreign policy had been one of the most enthusiastic American cold warriors.... Johnson had originally risen to power on the crest of the fulminating anti-communist crusade which marked American politics after World War II. Shortly after the end of that war, he declaimed that atomic power had become 'ours to use, either to Christianize the world or pulverize it' -- a Christian benediction if ever there was one. Johnson's demonstrated enthusiasm for American military intervention abroad ... earned him the sobriquet 'the senator from the Pentagon....'"
--Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins
"When I mentioned about Adlai Stevenson, if he was vice-president there would never have been an assassination of our beloved President Kennedy." --Jack Ruby's comment to reporters while being transferred to his prison cell. When asked to explain what he meant, Ruby (Oswald's killer and a probable conspirator in the JFK assassination) replied, "Well the answer is the man in office now [Lyndon Johnson]." Note: Adlai Stevenson advocated a conciliatory approach to international affairs in stark contrast to Democratic Party hawks like Lyndon Johnson. Johnson assumed the presidency following JFK's murder and escalated the Vietnam War exponentially. With his comment, it seems that Ruby was dropping a hint about the assassination -- that the JFK conspirators could not have achieved their goal of putting a hawk in the White House had Stevenson been Kennedy's vice-president instead of Johnson.
I don't buy all these ideas there were conspiracies. The trend is obvious that the different people who say conspiracy this, conspiracy that all seem to feed off of others. Others who are all into this conspiracy nonsense. And when one doesn't work, they go off on another tangent. It never ends.
Enjoyed the article, but there is one person's research these conspiracy people dare not mention regarding the Kennedy assassination.
A former Los Angeles district attorney by the name of Vincent Bugliosi performed research on this tragedy. And it took him twenty years to finish it.
As an aside, Vincent Bugliosi attained 32 convictions out of 33 high profile murder trials in Los Angeles. One of them was the conviction of Charles Manson and his entire family for the murders they committed back in 1969. To which he wrote the book "Helter Skelter," a masterpiece in American true crime non-fiction. He also went on to write other books, as well as performing work as a defense attorney.
Anyways, Vincent Bugliosi wrote a book entirely devoted to the Kennedy assassination called "Reclaiming History."
He told the truth. And in his book, which is rather long, he laid out exactly what happened before, during and after the assassination, even the subsequent murder of Oswald by Jack Ruby. In his book, he even outlined, picked apart and destroyed every single conspiracy theory there is out there, no matter how outlandish nor believable to the gullible.
As another aside, the book delved into how absolutely devastated Mrs. Kennedy was. She was in grief and shock so badly that she left Dallas on Air Force One wearing the same pink dress spattered with her husband's blood and brains that she wore in the motorcade. It brings home the sad fact of how unbelievable horrible this American tragedy this was. And still is.
His meticulous and in depth research proved that Oswald acted alone. There was no conspiracy. It was the act of a mad man intent on killing the President of the United States of America. He wasn't directed to do it by anyone. He acted alone. Period.
All hard evidence points at this being the case. You can't take facts and twist them around like the conspiracy theorists have been doing, and are still doing now. Every single piece of evidence, no matter if it's hard evidence or circumstantial, points any other way. There is nothing that says this is something other than the act of a single lone and crazed gun man.
Besmirching History
Vincent Bugliosi Assassinates Kennedy Again
By Michael Green
"The purpose of Bugliosi's Reclaiming History is to defend the integrity of the USG National Security State by grossly distorting its nature and function, by disguising that it is the servant of factions of the ruling classes within the United States, and by pretending that it did not and could not contemplate the assassination of a democratically elected President whose recalcitrant politics fell outside its parameters. According to Bugliosi, only the lunatic can seriously entertain that Kennedy was murdered because he pursued detente with the USSR, championed nuclear disarmament, decided not to back the invasion of the Bay of Pigs with US military, made a peaceful resolution of the Cuban Missile Crisis when the military wanted invasion and war, and decided to withdraw US troops from Vietnam rather than pursue by brute force an imperial venture in Southeast Asia."
Spare us. JFK was assassinated complements of the mob. By her own account, his mistress was told by LBJ the night before the assassination, that 'those SOBs would never embarrass'him again. 'Wish the liberal press would print the truth for a change.
Bugliosi, at this point in his life has no interest in being a patsy for anyone, let alone a corrupt (as you feel) government. His life has been built on integrity from day one.
The problem with the conspiracy nuts is they throw so much garbage out there they figure someone will believe something no matter how outlandish.
A malcontent. He had already tried to assassinate a retired military man 6 months prior. Perfect opportunity. If he was truly hired by the mob they would have had him executed long before Ruby got to him. He would have never been arrested and questioned.