The JFK assassination files recently released by president Trump shed more light on the secret plot by the CIA to use mafia gangsters to to kill Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. Investigative reporter Thomas Mayer, the author of Mafia Spies, his book about the unlikely alliance between the CIA and mobsters, is back to discuss the latest revelations.
Two Chicago gangsters, Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli, were central to a congressional investigation by Senator Frank Church in the mid nineteen seventies. Both were murdered shortly before they could testify. I was an investigator for another committee working on a related inquiry at the time. The mob style hit sent a chill through the senators digging into CIA abuses. Speculation continues about whether the CIA or a mafia kingpin silenced the mobsters.
Maronite discussed the murders and revelations from his new book, The Invisible Spy. His dogged investigation uncovered how former CIA Director Allen Dulles steered the Warren Commission's investigation of President Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, away from the plot to kill Castro. Thomas and mafia spies, we saw how the, CIA really escaped scrutiny. It remained a secret about their plot to use the mafia to try to kill Castro.
And then they end up influencing the Warren Commission investigating the murder of President Kennedy. What did you discover happened there? In Mafia Spies, the person who essentially, executes, bad word, but executes the plan to kill Castro is the head of the CIA, a guy named Allen Dulles. And he was, the head of the CIA for about twelve years.
He his tenure included a time period in the Kennedy administration, but he was also involved in the disastrous Bay of Pigs fiasco that the CIA, had essentially put together and gave to Kennedy in the early days of JFK's administration. And so when that became, very unsuccessful, in fact, a number of the people that were part of that invasion, the Cuban exiles who had trained under the CIA, they were caught by Castro. So there was a whole prisoner of war exchange. It was a fiasco for JFK.
He was very upset with the CIA, and he he got rid of, Allen Dulles. But when JFK was assassinated two years later, president Johnson, asked Allen Dulles to be part of the seven member Warren Commission. And so, Dulles was on there, and one of the things that Dulles did that came to my attention, one, in Mafia Spies, my book Mafia Spies, I show how Dulles essentially steered the other commission members away from looking at this plan to assassinate, Fidel Castro.
Castro said a few months before JFK's death, I know you're trying to kill me. And he said that publicly. It was out in the press there. And he said, Two can play that game. So if you're doing a murder investigation of the president of The United States and you're part of a commission, you would think that they would at least identify and thoroughly explore all the possible suspects, if you will. Obviously, Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin of JFK.
But was there, other factors involved in that murder? And it was Allen Dulles who steered, as a member of the Warren Commission, steered away, people on the commission from looking at this Castro assassination plot. And so we see that fifty, sixty years later, these documents that are part of the JFK assassination, they don't really provide any smoking guns about who who may you know, any other assassins, involved with, with the JFK murder. It was clearly Oswald.
But what we do see is a lot of documents about the attempts to kill Castro that were kept confidential, the CIA claiming, well, it'll reveal sources and methods and such. And and so, Dulles on the Warren Commission steered that commission, away from that. And so much so that about ten years later, when some of this started to come out, in the mid seventies, Then president Ford, Gerald Ford, who was a congressman in the in the sixties, on the Warren Commission, he was part of
that seven member Warren Commission. But later on, Gerald Ford said he blamed Dulles for not letting, the commission know about the plot to kill Castro. So that was something. And, you know, a lot of the my interest in Allen Dulles, comes from mafia spies. But in doing my new book, The Invisible Spy, interestingly enough, Allen Dulles is also a factor. He's not the major character. But he Allen Dulles was a lawyer, a corporate lawyer, and he be his spy career really begins with the first agency,
the first modern American spy agency. It was called the OSS, which was short for the Office of Strategic Services. The s the focus of my book, Ernest Cuneo, he was the first liaison. He was really the first American spy of World War two. He dealt with the British spies who were based Churchill put them in the top levels of Rockefeller Center in Manhattan, and it was Ernest Cuneo's job to deal with them. But one of the earlier folks that was recruited to the OSS
was Alan Dulles. And they actually worked together with Ernest Cuneo on some of the early, espionage schemes that were put together by the OSS. And then, Dulles was so smart and so successful that they sent him to Switzerland, and he dealt with a lot of spy schemes during World War two. And so, Dulles was aware of Cuneo. And then after World War two, when Dulles becomes the head of the CIA, which is the new, and modern, spy agency that still exists obviously today.
By the 1950s and even the sixties, Cuneo was an asset. He was in private life. He was working with e Ian Fleming, the creator of, James Bond. But as I show in the Invisible Spy, my new book, there were there were exchanges between Dulles and and, Cuneo. And Cuneo would at times be a tipster as an asset, giving information to Dulles and the CIA.
When Kennedy's assassination takes place and Dulles is put on the Warren Commission, it was clear that not only is Dulles trying to steer things away from the, Castro murder plot, but in the middle of that, one of the big things that was con of concern to Dulles, the CIA, and the FBI, J Edgar Hoover, was they didn't wanna be blamed for, not protecting president Kennedy sufficiently enough to avoid being assassinated by Oswald. Oswald was already on the radar screen of the CIA.
Oswald had gone down to Mexico. He had been to the Cuban embassy. He had been to the Russian embassy only a few months before JFK's assassination. So he's on the radar screen. And so when when Kennedy is murdered by Oswald, the what you see in these recently released papers is that, both the CIA and the FBI were very concerned about not being blamed for not protecting
the president of The United States. And so, what happens is that what I found in my research is that there are some documents, FBI documents, that show that Ernest Cuneo, the subject of the invisible spy, was approached he was in contact with Allen Dulles while Dulles was on the Warren Commission. And, Cuneo, who had been a journalist, was preparing to write a story ostensibly for the Saturday Evening Post, which was a very popular magazine at that time. A big inside the Warren Commission,
by Ernest Cuneo. This is what he was preparing. And his source was Allen Dulles. And Cuneo, though then goes to his friend, Hoover, at the FBI. And it's documents, which are kind of known in bureaucratic terms as cover your ass documents, that in other words, Cuneo came through the door, said, I'm talking to Allen Dulles, and Hoover and another top, FBI official put this in documents that said Cuneo is doing this piece,
with the help of Allen Dulles. He says that Allen Dulles is talking to in fact, Hoover says that a federal judge who's who used to be in the FBI, is also I told him that Alan Dulles is talking to Ernest Cuneo. But Hoover says, no way. The president doesn't want this out. He's gonna get in trouble. So to kinda cover their ass, if you will, Hoover writes his memo, the other FBI, official writes, his memo and those memos from early nineteen
sixty four. I find and I quote from, in my new book, The Invisible Spy, and what it shows is the first known leak, of a member of the f of the member of the Warren Commission to an outside source during the the deliberations of the Warren Commission into the death of JFK. So I I thought that was really very significant, and it also, once again, kinda shows the closeness between Dulles and, the subject of my new book, Ernest Cuneo, in the invisible spot.
As a former congressional investigator, the significant thing I see is that by not revealing the CIA's involvement with the mafia and the attempts to assassinate Castro, they closed off an avenue of investigation. And then this was really a murder investigation. Yeah. Of course. You know, when you do a murder investigation, you have to try to really pull out all the stops to try to
solve it within seventy two hours. That, you know, when you when you study how murders are are investigated by the police, you know, and I've done that as a journalist. I once did a project. We looked at 300 murder cases on Long Island. That's one of the things that they say is within seventy two hours, there's that window. In the murder of JFK, the main suspect, Oswald, is murdered by by Jack Ruby. So that was, that was already screwed up. There were a number of screw ups in
there. But the fact that the Warren Commission was steered away from, the Castro assassination plans by the CA, which involved, among others, two mafia characters, Johnny Roselli and Sam Jean Connor, and they were the focus of my book, Mafia Spies. You know, the fact that Dulles steered them away, it was something that, really affects our historical understanding, of what went on there. And and and and I have written, and I've been surprised these
new papers that have been released. As I say, they don't have any smoking gun about who killed Kennedy, but they show a lot of detail about this huge CIA operation run out of Florida, essentially an undeclared war, that was started with Eisenhower, carried out by the Kennedy administration. And then when Warren the Warren Commission is convened, Dulles is trying to steer the other members away from looking at that.
Well, Jack Ruby, who ran a sensational for its time topless club in Dallas, was really a wannabe gangster here. Did you find him linked to Giancana out of Chicago? Did he have links there or links to, the boss in New Orleans? Well, you know, I have to say, I'm one of the few people in twenty five years that have been writing about the Kennedys, where I've not tried to replicate a murder investigation. So the short answer is, I don't know. I think other authors should say the same
thing. They don't know. Rather than speculate and create an atmosphere of conspiracy levels and such. I think the biggest scoop, if you will, as a journalist, that has come out of, the Kennedy assassination was one that I put, twenty years ago in a book, about the Kennedys, and I interviewed, Father McSorley, the Jesuit who counseled Jackie Kennedy after the assassination. All of her letters, my taped interview
with McSorley, that all came out. But that was really news because now we know how, Jackie Kennedy reacted and all of the grief and the thoughts of suicide that she had. This was all reported, back when I did that book in 02/2003. It was in the New York Times. It was on all of the major news channels, CBS. It was on the Today Show and such. That was real news. That was real historical news. Like Mary Todd Lincoln, you know, just, after the Lincoln assassination.
But I think in terms of, I think it's important to get, have transparency and have the records related to the JFK assassination all become public, particularly at this late date. But, and I think I think that's important historically. But I don't think there's been anything really new either about Ruby or any other conspiracy, involving alleged conspiracy with with Lee Harvey o Oswald. And I do think it's really unhealthy for the American politic to constantly be engaged
in conspiracies. I think people need to put up or shut up, plain and simple. And so I I I think it's important to look, always to look, but I think it's it's really important to also not mislead people. So I Robert, I don't know the answer with Ruby. Well, one thing that really struck me in the latest batch of JFK documents was that the KGB had, Oswald under surveillance when he was in the Soviet Union, even while he was target shooting. And they concluded he was a poor shot.
Yet from, you know, the six story of the school book depository in Dallas, he hits, he has a headshot on a moving limousine with the president. Oh, there's it's loaded with question marks surrounding it. I mean, what murder suspect, says I was a patsy? You know, I've, I've heard plenty of murders where they, they say, Oh, he deserved it. She deserved it. Blah, blah, blah. I didn't do it. All that type of stuff. Or they say nothing on the advice of their attorney.
But what type of murder suspect says, I was a Patsy. That that is really, unnerving, to have that come out of Oswald's death, and then then he's murdered. It was a to it was a fiasco, as a murder investigation. And it's all to our detriment, certainly to the detriment of the Kennedy family that are crime victims. And I think that we have to keep that in mind the closer I got to writing about the Kennedy's private lives, which I did in my first book,
and the impact. That's what you realize. They are crime victims. It's terrible what happened to them, and particularly Jackie Kennedy, to watch her husband's brain brains blown out. But, historically, for the country, it's been a real disservice for people, including one particular member of the Kennedy family, to be fostering conspiracies and doubts about, legitimate authority. You know, it's just a disservice to the country.
In the latest, batch of JFK documents released by the Trump administration, did you find anything of interest in there of, you know, one of those moments of, oh, you know? Oh, yeah. I, you know, I found, a lot of stuff, particularly from my book, Mafia Spies, like for instance, Johnny Roselli. I actually found his code, level. The other thing is in Mafia Spies, the two gangsters, Johnny Roselli and, Sam Giancana, they had brought in another gangster by the name of,
Santo Trafficante. He had been involved. He was like he was a top mobster in Florida, but he was also involved with them when they were running a casino before Castro took over in Cuba. The the mob in America were running a number of casinos, including the San Sushi, which was run by Johnny and Sam Giancana, but also Santo Trafficante
was involved. And some of the documents that have come out show that not only was there doubt by some of the CIA, agents involved handling all of this, like Bill Harvey, who had real doubts about Trafficante and whether or not he was a double agent, but there were other, documents about whether or not Santo Trafficante was was a suspect in the murder, eventually, of Johnny Roselli in 1976.
And so, those documents, the investigative documents provide a lot more light about the last man standing, if you will, in Mafia Spies, which is Santo Trafficante. Well, and you think Trafficante certainly killed Roselli. Do you think he killed Sam Giancana out of Chicago? And interestingly, Roselli is murdered as he's getting ready to testify again before the church committee investigating, intelligence agency abuses. Both of them were supposed to testify.
In fact, there were investigators in Chicago about to prep Giancana for his testimony before the Senate about the whole Castro assassination plot. The reason why I think, well, with Roselli, there are documents that indicate, investigative documents, that are part have been disclosed that indicate that, Trafficante was the leading suspect in the death of Roselli. But why I think he had a hand in the Giancana murder, who Giancana was murdered in in the
basement of his home. He had like an apartment that he was, he would hang out at night. And, and somebody came in with a silencer late at night and and popped him, six six, shots. And the shots were formed around his mouth, which was a a sign of, basically as a warning to anybody else who would talk that you're gonna wind up like this if you talk as well. And that was highly publicized. But, the documents that were released, one of the things, is that the whoever it was that killed,
Giancana, we don't know who killed Giancana. There was never an arrest. But, apparently, whoever it was threw this the gun with the silencer out the window of a speeding car after the murder, apparently was, maybe heard the, police sirens. That's the theory of it. But that gun was found later on. That gun was traced back to, Tampa, Florida, which is the home base of Santo Trafficante. So I think to extent that there is a substantial lead about the death of Giancana, coming out of these papers,
I think that's it. I think that's why I think Trafficante had some hand in the death of both Johnny Roselli and, Sam Giancana. And do you think the motive for the murder is they violated the mafia's omerta, that you never talk? Or was he worried about what they were about to tell Congress? Well, I think the other gangsters were really upset about the behavior of Giancana and Roselli by getting involved because there was a national commission of mobsters, and they were supposed to disclose
things like that to their fellow mobsters. And then they they never told them. And also they had got garnered a a tremendous amount of attention to the operation of the mafia, which was by that by the mid seventies, which much more on the run than they were in the late fifties and the early sixties when the mob in America really was at its height. It was making tons of money. And so,
they paid a price. And I think, the the murder of both Jeanne, Conn and Roselli was, in in in response to their behavior, whether or not, it was to keep them quiet about what they knew. And in fact, Johnny Roselli faced the possibility of being deported out of The United States because he actually came here illegally as an Italian immigrant. And so there was talk about deportation. So Roselli kind of intimated that he knew something about the JFK assassination.
And what he knew, we don't know because he was murdered. And so that was really unnerving to a number of senators who were part of that committee looking at all of this. Gary Hart, for instance, that's a name I think people would remember.
And, he he expressed being very unnerved about it, but there were others, on the senate, committee, and they were all very upset about these murders, and also the fact that maybe, both these gangsters may have, been able to provide more light about the circumstances surrounding the JFK assassination. But we'll never know because they were both murdered.
Well, since Allen Dulles, who was the former CIA director on the Warren Commission, steers the commission away from the CIA plots with the mafia to assassinate Castro, Is this part of the reason it's just spread the conspiracy theories? Sure. Yeah. I mean, there's a, if you go to YouTube and you look up Allen Dulles, there's a NBC TV program that he did with John Chancellor of NBC News, and, it was a whole documentary about the science of spying was the name of it.
So you go to YouTube and you look it up, it's there. And Dulles is interviewed at his home here on Long Island. And he's actually asked, has the CIA ever tried to murder somebody? And Dulles says, no, the Russians, they would do so. And that was absolutely accurate. The Russians were involved with a number of different, murders and such. But he said, we would never do that. I would never ask other members of the CIA to do something that I wouldn't do.
And so, you know, it's a complete lie nationwide to the entire country. This is about 1966 or so. And as I said, that tape is on YouTube. You can easily find that. And so it's pretty extraordinary, the level of arrogance,
that people like Dulles had. You know, bear in mind, in Mafia Spies, my book Mafia Spies, Dulles is quote unquote the bad guy, and, but, you know, in doing my new book, The Invisible Spy, which is not about the sixties, but it's about the World War II era, The the, Dulles is a factor in the invisible spy, not to the same extent that he is in my book, Mafia Spies, but he is, like as as I mentioned, he was involved with Dulles,
excuse me. Dulles was involved with Ernest Cuneo, was the subject of the invisible spy working together for the OSS at Rockefeller Center in the very early stages of the world war two. Dulles was a terrific spy for the OSS. He was arguably the most successful spy for the OSS. And so one of the things I think the guys that came the men and women who came out of the OSS after World War two. One of the things that was discussed that Dulles was involved with was the plots to kill Hitler
during World War two. There were attempts there was an attempt to kill, Hitler. It was unsuccessful, but Dulles was dealing with those German Nazi spies that were involved in that plot to kill to to kill Hitler. And there was also a number of conversations even earlier that if if they had killed Hitler, would there have been millions of lives spared? In other words, would history have been different different if we had assassinated
Hitler. And I think so cut to twenty years later when Dulles is the head of the CIA. As much as it is outrageous to try to kill the a head of a foreign leaders to understand where they're coming from. I think when you read my book, The Invisible Spy, you realize that people like Dulles looked at their experiences with Hitler, and the fact that they failed to assassinate him and all the terrible consequences
of that. And they looked at Castro twenty years later in cahoots with the r Russians putting, nuclear threat threatening to put nuclear weapons in Cuba Ninety miles away from The United States. Cuba and Castro were perceived as existential threats to The United States. John Kennedy himself said that during the 1960 campaign.
But I think somebody like Dulles and those people that were in the CIA, who really cut their teeth, if you will, during World War Two, They had that experience with Hitler and the possibility of assassinating him. And I think that was in the back of their minds, as I now see it. When you look at it historically, it explains to some extent, at least some of the background for the Castro assassination plot. You know, as as you may know, I was an embedded reporter in Iraq.
And in that reporting experience over those years, I, you know, I met CIA case officers. I know some today that are retired. You know, they've all struck me as professional, ethical, and that it's a they came out of a very, very different agency than what's described in Mafia Spies. What's your sense of what the spy agency is today and how it changed? Well, I I I think it has changed a lot. As you say, it's much more professional.
There were a lot more safeguards that were put on the intelligence agencies, including the FBI after Watergate in particular. There was a ten year term put on the director of the FBI. There was more oversight of the CIA. And then some, unfortunately, some of those safeguards are now being, dismantled, currently. But, yeah, I think that the CIA,
became much more professional. I think what happened with the the attempts to kill Castro, as I mentioned, I think a lot of the motivation in retrospect as I reflect on this and doing the two books and particularly looking at a character like Dulles, I think they were very much influenced by, geez, if we had killed, if we had assassinated Hitler, we were told not to do that. The British discussed it quite a bit in the late, thirties. If we had done that, if we had gotten rid of Hitler,
how much suffering could have been avoided? How many lives could have been saved? And so I think that was part of the excesses with this Castro plot. I think we were at, I I think there was also the attempt by the CIA in this early sixties to use buffers, if you will. You know, in the the Godfather movie, they actually say, oh, the family has a lot of buffers. Well, the CIA had cutouts. That's what they were termed.
And so they didn't want to directly get involved in assassinating Castro, but they did have cutouts who dealt with the mafia. And so when you deal with, an entity like the mafia, and they realized this later on in in retrospect, that it was a big mistake because you can't control they have a different agenda than the good of The United States. And so the CIA members who didn't wanna get their hands dirty in this, they kind of relinquished control over over some
of the plots to kill Castro. And I think that was also one of the reasons why it turned out so poorly. And now a revealing footnote on the connection between Frank Sinatra and mob fixer Johnny Roselli. When the movie From Here to Eternity was in production, Columbia Studios had well known ties to organized crime. Sinatra wanted a role. Studio head Harry Cohen said no.
So Sinatra took another route. He went through a connection to the Genovese crime boss Frank Costello, who tapped Chicago Mobster Johnny Roselli to send a message. Roselli didn't mince words. When Cohen pushed back warning he had protection of his own, Roselli reportedly told him, You're an effin' dead man if you don't cast him. Cohen cast Sinatra. Sinatra won an Oscar. And as a gesture that said everything, he later sponsored Roselli for a membership in the elite Los Angeles Friars Club.
The source for this account and for the Genovese crime family's deep roots in Hollywood is retired FBI agent, Mike Campey's gripping new book, Mafia Takedown. In the next episode, Campey joins me to talk about the real mob and how he led the undercover operation that helped cripple the oldest and most powerful mafia family in New York. Forget the movies. This is the real story. I'm Robert Riggs for the True Crime Reporter podcast.