It had been raining, and the tarmac was still wet when President John F. Kennedy stepped down from Air Force One.
Yet the skies above Love Field airport were bright that Friday morning. The clouds had vanished, and a sudden burst of sunshine meant the bubble-top on the president’s midnight-blue Lincoln Continental convertible could be removed.
Kennedy would tour downtown Dallas in full view of his assassins.
Seeing the cheering crowd of supporters – one of whom handed the First Lady a bouquet of red roses – the president seemed relaxed as they prepared for the short journey to the city.
He said: ‘This trip is turning out to be terrific… it looks like everything in Texas is going to be fine for us.’
Yet there were overwhelming reasons for concern. The FBI’s secret wiretaps had picked up a torrent of Mafia death threats towards Kennedy. The dangers facing him in Dallas, a city with a reputation for mob violence, were well-known.
In fact, it was near certain that he wouldn’t leave the city alive that day. For, as I set out in my new history of the Mafia – drawing on my former life with the mob working for New York’s feared Gambino family – the sinister forces ranged against the president had, astonishingly, devised not one, but three separate plots to kill JFK in November 1963.
Two had been foiled already, but in their methods and their detail, these attempts on his life in Chicago and Tampa, Florida would eerily foreshadow the bloody fate that now awaited Kennedy in Dealey Plaza.
President John F. Kennedy and his wife Jackie greeting the crowd at Love Field airport on November 22, 1963
JFK, Jackie, Texas Governor John Connally and his wife Nellie smile at the crowds in Dallas on November 22, 1963
Each assassination plot had stationed sharpshooters on the upper floor of buildings above the route of a planned presidential motorcade.
Each was to be carried out by members of Right-wing paramilitary groups. And each had been hatched in a city controlled by Mafia factions very much known to want Kennedy dead.
The president hardly lacked for enemies, certainly not once he made the surprise decision to appoint his younger brother, Bobby, as Attorney General and head of the Justice Department.
The Mafia had backed, indeed helped pay for, Kennedy’s 1960 election victory over Richard Nixon in the belief that the Kennedy administration would be soft on organized crime in return. At the alleged behest of JFK’s father, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr, the mob funneled millions of dollars into the crucial West Virginia primary earlier that year when Kennedy, fighting for the Democratic nomination, was low on funds.
Now, though, some of the Mafia’s most influential figures were outraged to find Bobby waging war on organized crime – and them!
None were more determined to fight back than Sam Giancana, Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello – three of the most powerful mobsters in the US, running Chicago, Florida and the Gulf Coast respectively.
Marcello, who was based in Louisiana but also controlled adjacent Texas, had personal reason to loathe the new Attorney General as he was now on trial for fraud and the obstruction of justice.
Marcello had already survived an attempt to deport him without due process. Effectively kidnapped by Kennedy’s Justice Department, he was put on a plane and dumped in the jungles of central America. But was within months, Marcello had made it back to Louisiana.
There was anger, too among America’s Cuban exiles, who blamed Kennedy for failing to help them overthrow Cuba’s revolutionary Comandante, Fidel Castro.
They had been humiliated by the Bay of Pigs disaster when, in 1961, a force of CIA-trained exiles attempted to invade and reclaim the island from the Communist regime but found the president would not provide the military support they needed. The insurgents were promptly captured by Castro and imprisoned.
Fatally shot, JFK slumps down in the back seat of the presidential limousine as it speeds along Elm Street toward the Stemmons Freeway overpass. Jackie can be seen scrambling out the backseat and over the trunk, pushed back inside by Secret Service agent Clint Hill
Sam Giancana (pictured arriving at court), Santo Trafficante and Carlos Marcello were three of the most powerful mobsters in the US, running Chicago, Florida and the Gulf Coast respectively
Their fury with Kennedy was shared by rogue elements within the CIA and among far-Right sympathizers, too. The Kennedys, they believed, were soft on Communism.
The first of the three linked attempts to kill the president that fall was uncovered in late October, when an informant tipped the Secret Service about a plot to shoot him in Chicago.
It would be carried out by what the source described as ‘Right-wing paramilitary fanatics’.
Kennedy had been scheduled to arrive at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport on Saturday November 2 to attend the annual Army–Air Force football game at Soldier Field.
According to the informant, four sharpshooters would be hidden along the route of the motorcade as it made its way to the stadium.
But the Chicago branch of the Secret Service foiled the plot, found four rifles with telescopic sights inside a rented apartment and took two of four suspects into custody. Kennedy’s trip was cancelled in response.
The two suspects were then released – but we have never been told why.
What we do know is someone else was slated in to take the fall – not the four snipers.
The echoes of Lee Harvey Oswald – who was charged with Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas but claimed he was a ‘patsy’ – seem clear.
The name of the man in the Chicago plot was Thomas Arthur Vallee, a Korean War veteran.
Two months earlier, as Oswald was about to move from New Orleans to Dallas – where he got a job in a building overlooking the route of the presidential motorcade – Vallee landed a job as a printer in another tall building that overlooked Kenndy’s planned route to Soldier Field.
Like Oswald, Vallee had connections with the secret services and with Cuban exiles. And, from his window at work, he would have had a view of the presidential limousine that was three levels lower and ten times better than Oswald’s view from the Dallas School Book Depository.
There is another strange parallel: the motorcade in Chicago was scheduled to make a sharp turn right in front of Vallee’s building, thereby slowing Kennedy’s car to a crawl – a quirk of planning repeated in Dallas with fatal consequences.
The second attempt on Kennedy’s life, in Tampa, was planned for later in the month.
On November 9, a police informant recorded a conversation with a Right-wing extremist called Joseph Milteer.
The two men were discussing the president’s visit to the Sunshine State on November 18, when Milteer made an extraordinary claim about a scheduled motorcade.
He said it would be easy ‘to get to [Kennedy]…from an office building with a high-powered rifle’.
Asked by the informant if he were serious, Milteer replied: ‘Oh yeah, it’s in the working… They will pick up somebody within hours afterwards… Just to throw the public off.’
The Dallas Police Department mug shots of Lee Harvey Oswald following his arrest for his involvement in the assassination of JFK
Oswald reacts as Jack Ruby fires his .38 caliber Colt Cobra revolver at point blank range
This time, that plot was foiled by the Miami Police, who passed details to the FBI and the Secret Service. Incredibly, no action was taken to warn the president. The Secret Service agents who were planning Kennedy’s trip to Dallas claimed they were not informed.
It might seem curious that the three assassination attempts planned for Kennedy in November 1963 were in Chicago, Tampa and Dallas. But of course, these were cities under the control of Giancana, Trafficante and Marcello, three of Kennedy’s most implacable Mafia opponents.
So, with Chicago and Tampa off the table, it had to be Dallas which, filled with his slot machines and duke boxes, happened to be the most important city in Mafia don Carlos Marcello’s invisible empire.
The authorities were warned about this hit, too.
On November 20, a stripper who worked for nightclub owner and Mafia fixer Jack Ruby (who would become notorious for killing Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV) was thrown from a car near the town of Eunice, Louisiana.
Melba Christine Marcades, whose stage name was Rose Cherami, had been beaten up by her travelling companions and then dumped.
Rescued by Lieutenant Francis Fruge of the Louisiana State Police, Cherami started talking as he took her to hospital, claiming – extraordinarily – that she’d been on her way to Dallas to ‘pick up some money, pick up her baby, and kill Kennedy’.
She claimed that the two men who beat her up had been Italians making a drug run from Miami to Houston. And they’d told her that, after Houston, they were heading to Dallas to murder the president.
We know that Santo Trafficante was a major drug trafficker in Miami. Did he send these men to Texas?
What’s certain, is this: from November 9 onwards, the FBI and the Secret Service not only knew of a serious plot to assassinate Kennedy, but exactly how it would be carried out. Yet still the trip to Dallas went ahead.
On the morning of Monday November 18, 62-year-old Forrest Sorrels, the man in charge of the Secret Service detail in the city, was instructed by a superior to make a slight but important change to the route of Kennedy’s motorcade.
Having turned right on to Dealey Plaza, it would now make an abrupt left turn, a tweak that would dramatically reduce the speed of the president’s limousine between the Texas School Book Depository building – where Oswald worked – and a stockade fence at the top of a grassy knoll peering down on to the plaza.
Agent Sorrels was informed of the change by Agent Winston Lawson, who, in turn, got it from Washington. It may be that it made it easier to access the Stemmons Freeway, arguably the fastest route to JFK’s next event being held at the International Trade Mart, though the change surprised many on the ground, not least because it would later emerge that it placed the President in a perfect kill zone.
On November 21, as Carlos Marcello’s two-week trial for fraud was wrapping up in New Orleans, attorneys from around the country converged on Washington DC for a special two-day conference. Convened by Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department, it was devoted to the complete destruction of organized crime.
That same day, President Kennedy flew into San Antonio, Texas, where he was greeted by Vice President Lyndon Johnson. Johnson, a native of Texas was, like his weekly lunch pal, J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, having problems with the Kennedys.
Believing Johnson to be corrupt – and, of course, a powerful political rival – Bobby Kennedy wanted him out of the way. Now, the Justice Department had trained its searchlights on the vice-president’s crooked friends and the Senate was conducting a special investigation into Johnson and his activities.
On the morning of November 22, as Jack and Jackie Kennedy prepared to leave their Fort Worth hotel room for the short flight to Dallas, he walked over to a window in their suite and mused aloud in front of his wife and his special assistant, Ken O’Donnell.
‘We’re in nut country today,’ he said. ‘It would not be a very difficult job to shoot the president of the United States.
‘All you’d have to do is get up in a high building with a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight, and there’s nothing anybody could do.’
His entourage left Love Field at 11.55am and drove the six miles to downtown Dallas.
At 12.29pm, Kennedy smiled and waved as the limousine followed the last-minute mysterious alteration in the route, making a sharp left turn on to Elm Street, which slowed the vehicle to fewer than ten miles per hour.
A quarter of a million people had jammed the sidewalks to see him pass by.
Beneath the din of deafening cheers, Texas First Lady Nellie Connally, travelling in the same car, said: ‘Mr President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you.’
Lyndon B. Johnson is sworn in as president as Jackie, still covered in her husband’s blood, stands at his side in Air Force One, on the ground at Love Field airport
As she later recalled, Kennedy’s ‘eyes met mine and his smile got even wider,’ before a bullet hit him in the throat. The president clutched at his neck with both hands as another shot hit her husband, Governor John Connally.
A third was fired from behind the limousine before yet another, fired from the grassy knoll, took off a chunk of Kennedy’s skull.
By 1pm, the president had been pronounced dead at Parkland Hospital. Vice-President Lyndon B Johnson summoned a judge and was sworn in as his replacement.
The mob was jubilant. That same evening, Florida don Santo Trafficante met for dinner with his attorney, saying: ‘The son-of-a-bitch is dead… This is like lifting a load of stones off my shoulders… Our problems are over.’
Trafficante raised a toast, saying: ‘For a hundred years of health and to John Kennedy’s death.’
Back in Washington, the Senate investigation into Johnson simply died, as did an upcoming multi-part Life magazine investigation.
‘It was going to blow Johnson right out of the water,’ editor James Wagenvoord later said. ‘Johnson would… probably have been facing prison time.’
Bobby Kennedy canceled the afternoon session of his Justice Department crime conference.
‘Everyone knew it was over,’ concluded Ronald Goldfarb, former special assistant to the Attorney General and now a respected author. ‘Everyone knew the Mafia had won.’
Borgata, Clash of Titans, the second part of Louis Ferrante’s History of The American Mafia is published by Pegasus in the US, price $29.95 and Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK, price £25.
