BOMBSHELL-Mike Rothmiller

to silence her. The new evidence and testimony is provided by Mike Rothmeller, who, as a detective of the Organized Crime Intelligent Division o CID of the LAPD, had direct personal access to hundreds of secret la PD files on exactly what happened at Marilyn Monroe's California home on August fifth,

nineteen sixty two. With his training and investigator's knowledge, Rothmeller used that secret information to get to the heart of the matter to the people who were there the Knight Maryland died, two of whom played major roles in the cover up and the wider conspiracy to protect the Kennedys at all costs. There'll be those with doubts, but to them, the law man who directed an international intelligence operations targeting organized crime, says the printed, forensic and oral evidence are

totally convincing. He insists, if I presented my evidence in any court of law, I'd get a conviction. The book we're featuring this evening is Bombshell, The Night Bobby Kennedy killed Marilyn Monroe, with my special guest, historian, author, and former detective Mike Rothmeller. Welcome back to the program, and thank you so much for this interview. Mike roth Miller.

I know what it said in the police manual says they investigate organized crime, that was it, But what they really did, I had no idea. And so we were talking one day and I happened to arrest the guy who had a just a book making warn out for his arrest. And as it turned out when I started interrogating him, he was one of the shooters in a contract killing, and for some reason he decided to lay this out and it was an organized crime killing on

the Pasadena Freeway. What happened there was a woman involved in the car that he was driving, a guy with the shotgun in the backseat, and they pull him next to this car. He fires out the window, shoots the guy and heads the shotgun and kills him. And the little side note on that the guy who actually did the shooting was the Maytag repair man in that city where I was at. During the day, he would repair horses and dryers, and that night he was carrying out

contract killing. So anyway, this guy lays it all out, and we had some other people that arrest them for murder and so forth. And I had taken the detective exam and very high in so I knew within a month or two I was going to be promoted. And they told me. They said, hey, there's an opening in

OCID coming up. Why don't you apply? I said, sure, why not otherwise they assigned you somewhere And I went down took the interview with the captain and the lieutenants, and there was roughly one hundred guys applied for it, and I was the youngest by age, and I hadn't been promoted to detective yet more. The rest of them were all detectives that had been for years, and for

some reason the captain selected me. I went into CID and that's when I got my first taste of what really was going on within that division, and I started going through the files, the file cabinets, and he remember, there's these huge file cabinets with index cards because we didn't have computers, and there are probably a good forty

to fifty thousand cards, and they're different people. They're index cards, which meant all of them had either one or hundreds or thousands of intelligence reports written on them, and each card is linked to other ones, their associates, relatives, or whatever it may be. So when I was going through, they came across a lot of politicians, and I thought that was rather interesting, including the mayor at the time of Los Angeles, who was a former LA cop. And

I looked at it, there's nothing criminal. It was just surveillance of him, who he met with and so forth. So I started jumping through the files and I found came across the Kennedy's John Kennedy primarily I looked at first, and it was massive, the dossier they had on him, and his was linked to Robert Kennedy, Edward Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe,

and also Peter Lawford among some organized crime people. I started pulling those files out of curiosity and I started reading them, and as I was going through these files, I started realizing that, wait a minute, some of this stuff regard that I've heard in the past regarding Marilyn Monroe is not true. I know what the official story was, but these files were telling me something completely different. And the intelligence files are always accurate because there's no spin

placed on him. So I continued reading those files over a period of months and maybe years on and off, and I started finding a file on a guy named Fred Otash, and Fred Otash was the person who placed the wire taps on Maryland's house and on Peter Lawford's house.

He also planted bugs in their house listening devices, and I started reading about that, and I saw some of the manscripts of these conversations Peter Lawford was having with Robert Kennedy and John Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe and so forth. And I looked up Fred and he was still around. He was in Los Angeles, and so I got in contact with him, and over a period of time I developed him as an informant. And the reason I did that because he was operating. One day he was acting

as a criminal, white collar crime. The next day he wasn't. And so the people he ran with in the criminal world were the ones I was interested in. So he was an ideal person, half as an informant. And I started talking to Fred, and finally one day we got together and I confronted him on this. I started quizzing him about the nineteen sixties yearly sixties, because that's when he was very active in doing this, and he was

very accurate. His memory hadn't failed. He was detailed. But I also caught him in a couple of direct lies. When I called him on it, he admitted that he was bsing me, and so then he started telling the truth. So as this conversation went on and over the months, I said, okay, Fred, who hired you to place these wiretaps and bugs? Starting in Peter Lawford's I said, what happened there? Who hired you? He said, well, when I planted a bug in his office in his home office.

He said that was Peter asked me to do that. And I said, well why, He says, well, because Peter's holding meetings in there, in negotiations on whatever. And he said Peter would have the conversation and he would excuse himself, go into the next room, then listen in to what was being said. I said, okay, that makes sense. A lot of business people have done that. And I said, okay, now,

how about the wiretap on this phone? He says, Well, he says, when I was there installing the the bugs in his house, Fred being Fred, he said, I installed a wiretap on his phone for his personal use. Well, Fred was supplying loads of information to the scandal sheets then in Los Angeles and other places, the inside information on movie stars and that stuff. So he did that

so he could sell that information. And he said as time went by, not a lot of time, a short period of time, he said he was contacted by the CIA and they asked for the information that he was receiving on the wiretaps and bugs. And he said, also Jimmy Hoffer's agent came to him, same thing. They won. So he says, over period of the months, he was being paid by Jimmy Hoffa, the CIA, the FBI, and LAPD Organized Crime Unit to give him that information that

he was gathering on wiretaps and so forth. So he did. But he said, finally what happened was the haffa in the CIA. They wanted a lot of stuff on Kennedy on the Kennedy Brothers. So he installed the wire tap in Maryland's house and the bug in her house. And I asked him, how did you do that? How did you get into her house to do this? And he said, well, he had a couple of guys from the phone company on his payroll. They just cut off the telephone service

to Maryland's house. Then they went over there and said, we know you don't have telephone service. We're here to repair it. And Maryland wasn't there, so the housekeeper said, great, come on and do it. So when they did that, they installed the wire tap and they installed the bugs in the house. So he was dishing out this information to the various agencies. He said he gave haff A very little because Haffa was a hothead and he was afraid he would go public and then he would find

himself in a bind. That the main players that he gave to were the other agencies of the FBIICI. But he said he swore he gave everything to OCID, which I didn't believe. But I asked him why and he said, well, because you guys are the hometown team. He lived in la and he says, I know what you guys can do to me, and he says, I don't want any trouble from you. So he says, I gave all my information to OCID. So that's how it started coming about.

And I kept digging more and more through the LAPD files. I started finding more about Fred and his wiretapping and information the transcripts. And then what was really curious is that as I dug it deeper in the files, I came across a copy of her diary, which was interesting because I always thought, as I had heard from everybody else, it was lost, it was gone, nobody knows what happened to it. Well, LAPD Intelligence had a copy of it, and it was it was title Maror Moro's Diary. And

I just start flipping through it. It was a xerox copy of it, I should say, And I start flipping through it and yeah, okay, I see this is her. She's talking about people she knew. But what I did at the time is when I went through it, if she made some comment about somebody I didn't know, I've never heard the name. She just said, like, I'm going over to Larry's house for dinner. So and so I has nice roses something like that. I didn't pay attention

to because I didn't know what she's talking about. But when she came to the point of talking about Peter Lawford, the Kennedys, mainly Jack and Robert, I noticed that, and I knew who she was talking about, because she one time said the President, and she said Jack and John blah blah blah and Robert, and I took notes of those right at the time. I just started making copies writing down what she's saying. I've had those all these years,

and those appear in the book. But she got into talking about her feelings regarding the President and Robert Kennedy. She talks about having sex with the President and how he gave her appeal one time, which was probably a sedative of some type. But she just goes on talking about the type of sex she liked and she wasn't that thrilled about it, but she did it anyway. So the diary gets into that and talked about that, which

is all in the book. And then she talked about her relationship with Robert Kennedy, and which once again all her comments are in the book, but she it appears that she actually fell in love with Robert Kennedy, and she did think, apparently that he was going to leave his wife and they were going to get together, which

never would have happened. But as time went by, when JFK, because I read the intelligence auction, when he was caught on a wiretap by the FEDS, the FBI talking to a few mob people and also talking to Maryland, Hoover went to Robert, or had Robert come to him, I should say, and said, here, listen to these it's your brother talking to so and so. We know what he's doing, and you know, I just want to let you know.

And so that was Hoover blackmailing JFK with the intelligence indications that Robert told his brother, and that's when he broke off the relationship with Maryland, and she was upset. But also what happens, Robert was kind of the middleman there to smooth things over, to keep her calm, keep her happy, and he started having an affair with her. Then as time went by, she started calling DJ where

Robert was the attorney general. She started calling the White House and nobody was returning her calls, and she was getting pissed off. And that is verified by what Fred Otash knew from his recordings and from what it basically says in her diary and the other intelligence documents, and so Peter Lawford was then called to go over and try to calm Marylynd down. This was a couple of weeks before her death, and he was trying his best, but she wasn't having any of it, and she said, no,

I want them, you know, talk to me. I don't like being treated like a basically a whore and being tossed around. And so Peter found himself in a difficult position. He was trying to be middleman and suite of both sides and it wasn't working. So she did, because I read the transcript she did threatened to go public with the information of her having a interfere with John Kennedy

and Robert Kennedy and Peter. She told Peter that, and Peter immediately got a hold of them and said, you know, hey, she's on the verge of going public and blowing up, and she wants to talk to Robert and he won't talk to her. And so finally Peter talked him into coming over and seeing her. And in her diary she mentions that that Bobby was coming over and so they he flies in, Robert flies in, Peter picks him up the airport, he flew into private plane and takes him

to his house. At his house, he has a telephone call from JFK. Robert's talking to Jeff K from Peter's house. Then they talked with Marilyn a couple of times. Peter does. They go up there to her house that afternoon. He says, they try to make everything amenable, but she wasn't going for it, and so they leave and he says, he speaks to her a couple more times, and your telephone, Peter does, and she agrees to let them come up

that night. So they go up that night and they're meeting with her again and I said, well, who is at the house And he says, there's nobody there, just Marilyn, Peter and Robert Kennedy. And I said, okay, what happened? So he goes into his first version. Well, pardon me, let me back up. I'm got ahead of myself. I met Peter Lawford at the Playboy Mansion prior to this

meeting with him. I went up there on a weekend because we had access to the Playboy Mansion working intelligence, and I took my wife and a couple of friends to have a tour. In this room, I see this haggard old guy watching the TV set and I thought it was kind of strange, and he looked at me. Then I realized who it was as Peter Lawfer. He looked pretty haggard, and he was either a combination drugs and alcohol, but he was just pretty much out of it. I talked to him briefly for a second. He just

kind of nodded. I shoved a business card of mine in his shirt pocket. My wife and the friends come over. Oh, hello, mis loved high. He just kind of nods, and then we go about our business. Well, when I'm at the office the next time, i'd get a call from him, and he didn't remember meeting me, and he just said, hey, I found this card in my pocket and I don't

know what it's for or why I got it. And I started talking to him about it, said, well, I mentioned the Floodboard Mansion so forth, and I would like to talk to you about some historic events that happened to Hollywood during the late fifties and sixties. And he says okay, and then he goes are you with the CIA, which is a very strange question, and I say no, I work LAPED Intelligence and he goes okay, and he says, oh,

what do you want to talk about? And I said, well, just some old historic stuff, you know, just get together and chat because I didn't want to tell him what it was over the phone. And then he says again, he says, are you sure you're not the CIA? And I said, yes, I am not the CIA. So it was rather strange that he was asking me if I was a CIA. But we agreed to meet up in a park the following day, not far from the Playboy mansion. I go up there. I'm waiting and waiting. About an

hour later, he hasn't shown. I'm ready to leave. Then I finally spotted walking in the park. I go over and talk to him and he doesn't remember me seeing me, and we sat down on the bench and he said what do you want and I said, well, I just want to talk to you about the past. So I started quizzing him, which you always do on people like that, about their memory. And I started quizzing him about the fifties, late fifties and sixties Hollywood and what he was doing

and so forth with the Kennedys. And he was accurate, and he wasn't drunk, and he wasn't under influence of drugs or anything at the time, and he was very accurate and detailed. And so I said, Okay, I just want you to clear up something regarding Marilyn Monroe's death and that I can just see. He's stiffened up instantly, and he says what And I said, well, I just want to hear your story. So he proceeded to tell me the story that was scripted for him with LAPD's

assistance LPED Intelligence way back when. And I knew that was BS. And so I told him, said that I just left this, Peter, that's not true. That's a lie that was given you by LP And he got a little upset about that, and he stood up and he was ready to leave, and I stood up, And at that point I knew I had to move it from a simple interview to a hostile interrogation, which is a difference in the way they're handled and what you do.

So I got up and I started getting on and getting in his face and basically telling us to no, no, you're going to tell me what happened. We're really happy you're not going to give me that line of so and so that you've been given for years. I said, I want to know what happened. And then I got into it. I said, you know, Bobby's dead, Jack is dead. Maryland said, everybody's dead, but you who knew anything about it? And I said, I just want you to clear it up.

And I'm not coming after you. Nobody's coming after you. I said, but but you asked me a lot about the CIA and so forth. And I said, you know, there are a lot of people who would want to know you would be telling me, and just meeting with me is going to put some fear into them about what you may have said. So I said, this is your chance. Tell me now what happened, or forget it. You know, you may find yourself in a position you

don't want to be. So he just he looked at me and then he just he sat down on the bench and I sat down next to him again, and he just cradled his hands, I mean, his face in his hands, and he is just quiet, and he's just said, what do you want to know? And I just said, tell me the truth of what happened. So at that stage he opened up and it just started flowing out.

And it was rather interesting because in the past, when I interrogated people that were carrying a huge burden of guilt, when they start relieving it unloading that you can see it in them, and it's just it's really an interesting transformations to watch. So he just started unloading unloading, and I knew he was telling me the truth because I read all the intelligence funded and so he was just going through it what happened and what went on in the house, And I said, okay, well, now you're at

the house that night, what happened? He says, well, I'm just going to paraphrase everything, making sure that what's in the book, But is that Robert and Marylyn gotten a huge, huge argument and to the point where she he thought she was going to slap him. Robert pushed her down onto the ground. They're screaming at each other, so he says he had to break them up. He pulled Robert back and Marilyn got up and they're just a screaming contest going on. So he says he kind of calmed

Marylynd down some. Then he and Robert start searching the house and going into the bedroom and so forth, and pulling out trust her drawers, looking through there, and he says, when Robert is doing the druseph George, Maryland came up and grabbed him, screaming at him. He pushed her down again on the floor and then grabbed her by the wrist, and they were just a true screaming match, and so he was definitely afraid. Peter was. He said that it

was warm, the windows and the house were open. He was afraid the neighbors were going to hear the screaming the argument and called the police. He was definitely afraid of that. So he says, this continued, and finally he was able to shuttle Maryland into the living room and sat her down on the sofa. He sat next to her, and he's holding her and he's just talking, trying to calm the situation down. Robert keeps quizzing her, asking her some questions, which once again that's all in the book.

But anyway, Robert then leaves the room and he goes into the kitchen and Peter waits a few minutes. He doesn't come back. He said it seemed a few minutes and he walks in to see what he's doing, and he said, he walks in and he's got a what appeared to be a it was a clear glass goblet thing with clear water in it, and he's got a spoon in it and he's steering it, stirring it. And so I said, said, well, what color was the water? He said, he just was clear, but he had a

spoon in there. And I said, okay, you don't put a spoon in water, you know, and stir it. And so I said, what did he put in? And he says, well, I don't know, he says, but I think it was I found it was a sedative of something, and he said okay, And then what happened, he said, Well, then they they walked back into the living room and Marylyn still on the sofa crying, and he offers her, says, here,

take a drink or feel better. She didn't want it, and then Peter was coaxing, here's no, I'll go ahead drink. He'll feel better if you're better. And he thought it was just a perhaps a simple sedative that helped calm her down, and so she sifted. She complained to the taste. They pushed her a little bit more. She drank more and they just kept talking, and he says Robert walked back into the kitchen with the glass. He said, then

he continued searching the house. He said, then he went followed Robert once again left Marylyn on the sofa, and he says they were gone. He says, he said he wasn't sure how long they were gone searching part of the house, but he said when they came back in, Marilyn was still on the sofa with her head tilted back, and she looked like she was sleeping or just out

of it because the drugs. Says that they continued looking around them and they came were coming back in, they heard a knock at the door, and Peter said he pretty much panicked at that stage because he just felt that it had to be the police coming or a neighbor coming to see what's going on. And he said, before he said, nobody said anything. He said, Robert didn't say anything, Peter and anything. But Peter said, I walk

from her. I looked at her, and she was waxing looking and most people, if you've seen him right after they die, that's pretty much how they look. And I said, well, she breathing. I don't think so, I said, did you think they she was dead? He says yeah, and so they Bobby just says we got to go, takes him by the arm, leads to the front door, and he said, well, what about Maryland, you know? And he go, let's go.

They opened the door and he says, he looks and there's two men standing there in plain clothes, and he says, nobody said a word. He said, they didn't say anything. We didn't, he says. Bobby didn't say anything, he says, and they just stepped back and we walked out, and Bobby said we got to go, and went to the car and he said, I look back and saw these guys enter the house and close the door. So I said, well,

do you know who they were? And he said no, not really And I said have I don't know their names? And I said, have you ever seen either one of them before? He says, yeah, the one guy I've seen before. And I said in what context? He says, well, before John Kennedy became president and before Robert was in and he offically says this guy was a friend of theirs.

And he says, I know he's a cop. He says, And what happened is the two brothers are individually, they'd come out to LA and this guy would act as their chauffeur and bodyguard and pure pure women form and so forth. And at that point it clicked in my head who the person was. And so I said, you've seen him before. I said, would you recognize the name if you heard it? And he said, I don't know. And I said, was the guy's name? Last name? Hamilton?

He goes, that's it, that's the guy. Well, Hamilton was the captain of the Intelligence Division and a very longtime friend of Robert and Jack Kennedy, and so he's the one that went into the house. Well, then as Peters taking him to the airport, they were stopped by Beverly Hills cop and for speeding. And he went on and Robert went back up flew secretly back at the Central California and I asked him, I said, well, why did you ever hear why there was a delay in calling

the police when Marilyn died? And he said, well, you know I heard stories internally. I said, what he says, Well, to give him time to get out of LA, meaning Robert, I said, so basically to build an alibi. He goes, yeah, yeah. I asked him also if he thought that they meaning that Kennedys wanted her dead, and he just basically nodded, you know, affirming that he did. But he also said he said he felt to me it was often he felt terrible about this, and he said, but they didn't

have to do it. They didn't have to do it, and which they didn't have to do it. There are other ways would have been available to handle her at the time. But then was interesting in ninety three, after my first book. It was about ninety three, if my first book was out La Secret Police, I'd get a call from a guy named Jack Clemens and I said, okay, who are you Jack? You know, I don't know. I didn't know him. And he said, well, you know, I was LPD blah blah blah a certain amount of time.

He says, I was the first guy, first LPD cop at Marylynd's home the night she died. He was to watch command. He took the call and he went up there and I said, okay, okay, that's fine. What then and he said, well, I want to get together with you and tell you what happened. Okay. You know, I was already out of law enforcement by that time. I had already been doing a television show and everything. And I got together with them and I said, well, what

do you want to tell me? So he says, well, you know, there was a huge cover and they tried to get me involved in it. And I knew there was a cover up obviously, and I said, okay, well tell me your story. And he went on and said, well, the night I got there, he said everything was being staged. And he said it was staged before I got there. And he says, but I couldn't prove it at that time.

But he said, about a week later, he's at the station where's working, and he said, these two guys come in and he says, they identify themself from OCID, and he said, talk to me, and they said, here, we want you to sign. This report is called a fifteen seven. Basically, he would write out what he saw and did that night and turn it in and he read it and he said, I didn't write this, and he said, he write it further. He says, and this didn't happen this way,

this is BS. I'm not going to sign this. He said no, you're going to sign it, and he said no, I'm not. So then at that stage he said, the one guy pulls out his ID and guess who it is, Captain Hamilton warning him to sign it, and he said, I'm not going to sign it. I don't care who you are. He said, chief of police can make me

sign this. So he says, they move on to the next of He said, okay, well, what we want you to do is look at these photographs and what they were death seeing photographs of the house and so forth, but primarily the ones in Maryland bed and he said, we want you to sign Well, that's completely out of LAPD protocol. When there's a photograph of a crime scene, the photographer has their name on it, not some cop

that was there. And he's looking at these photographs, eight by ten black and whites, and one he says, he there's the second one they shown him. They showed Marylyn in bed and most people have seen them. She's laying in bed holding a telephone receiver. And he says, the next one they showed me. It's the same picture, but she doesn't have the telephone receiver in her hand. Now you look at that and as a COMPI instantly, no, wait a minute, they're altering evidence their staginess. But for

what reason he didn't know at the time. He refused the initials. He says, no, I'm not going to do it, forget it. So that was pretty much his death meal, and they ran him out of the PD a short

time later. And the other thing that was interesting is in at the same time, about ninety three and nine before, I was doing a radio talk show about a book, and two of the guys that are on the line with me is Sam Yorty, who was the mayor at the time, and Tom Redden, who was a deputy chief when she died and he later became chief of police. So we're just we're chatting about it. And both of them asked me when we went to a commercial, I said, can I call you? I want to talk to you. Fine,

I gave my number, read and pardon me. Yordy calls me the next day and I said, yeah, well, what do you want to talk about? And he says, well, I want to know about Merri Monroe, what the truth is because he says Parker who was the chief. Then he says he just lied to me on so many things, and I said, okay, So I tell him what I knew and he goes okay, And I said, now do you want to know what was in your file? Because he had a massive intelligence file. Most guy he maintained

on him. And I said, you want to know what's in your Fox says no, he didn't want to hear it. And so that was the end of our conversation. Tom Wrenn calls me several days later and we're talking and he says, same question. He says, would you please tell me what really happened with Marilyn Monbro And I go what? And I said, you were the chief of police. You're the deputy chief when this happened. You were in Parker's offices we were talking about. He says, well, here's what happened.

He says, yeah, I was a deputy chief. And he says when Captain Hamilton came in, because Hamilton also went to the phone company and pulled all of the records on Merrily Unroll's telephone calls, he brought him in, gave him to Chief Parker, and Redden was in Parker's office when he delivered those and they all went over him. He says, then Parker took those telephone polls, put him in his personal and that was the end of it, you know. He said that we just didn't talk about

it anymore. So Redten ends up down the line becoming chief of police, and he tells me, he says, the first thing I did the first day I was chief, I got into the office is I called OCID, And he says the guy who answered, he says, I think he was a lieutenant. I'm not quite sure that I don't remember, but he says, I asked him, he said, do you guys have any files, intelligence files on Marilyn Monroe, Peter Laufer, the Kennedys. And the guy said, well, yes

we do, Chief, you know, certainly we do. And he says, fine, get all those files together, bring them my office this afternoon. I want to see him. Sure you got it? Well, he says. That afternoon comes and the captain from OCID comes in carrying nothing, and he says, I understand you wanted to talk about the Kennedy's and Marollan this chief, and he says, no, I want to see the files.

And the character says, we don't have any files on them, and Redden says, I knew he was lying, but he says the way that OCID had a filing system, which I noticed to be a fact. He says, I could have went down there and spent months and never found anything that I was looking for, right because there was

a code that we had internally in intelligence. And he said, I also knew that the files would be hidden quickly, just pull him out, take him out, and put him in the trunk of a car, and they don't exist anymore. So he says, I knew I was being lied to even when I was chief. So he said, that's what I want to know from you, what really happened. So I laid it out to him, and he said he was not surprised by hearing it, all the details and so forth.

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address ZipRecruiter dot com slash murder. Once again, remember to go to this unique place ZipRecruiter dot com slash m r der ZipRecruiter the smartest way to hire. Now, Mike, we were just talking about this information that you were asked by the incredibly the chief of police in LA. So continue with what else they do they gained from your conversation with you about this case and what you knew from being an OCID.

Peter Lawford picked him up. OCID was surveilling them, and I saw some surveillance photographs taken that day during daylight hours of those two guys together when he was supposed to be up in Central California. So it wasn't a It wasn't a huge secret within the intelligence guys that he was there that day and they went to Maryland's

house and so forth, and what happened. What is really interesting is that, keeping us in context with people have to know, is that of the sixty detectives that were in there in the organized crime when I was there, in the five years, we never made one arrest, not one, wow, and for anything. And the reason being we were mandated

just to gather intelligence. And the reason that was done is because if we made an arrest and we went to court and there was a subpoena, serve for records and so forth, they're going to have a difficult time explaining illegal a history of illegal wire taps, black bag jobs, break ins, other intimidating sort of things that went on with people. And they didn't want that. They just wanted the chief, just wanted the intelligence. So that's what was done.

And also what's very important to understand is that in the history of OCID, well it started as a gangster squad in nineteen thirty two and it went on changed names two times, but I was always doing the same stuff. Is that whenever if you want to say a celebrity or notable person whoever was died in a bizarre way. Mainly look at a homicide in Los Angeles, so southern California. Two things that happened, and this happened in Marilyn Monroe.

It happened with Bugsy Siegel, the mobster. It also handled a Robert. They handled the same way with Robert Kennedy. And that is the homicide unit, which would been Robert homicide. They hand the criminal investigation. They handle going to court, testify and all that stuff. Well, while they're doing their investigation OCID or the intelligence unit what it was called back then, too, is that they do an intelligence investigation. Except the difference is too mainfold. One is that they

don't follow the rules. They just did what they wanted, wire tats, break in, so forth, and they never shared the information with the homicide guys that are really doing the case. The homicide guys never knew what the intelligence guys are doing. And so they did that on those particular cases, and they did that on Maryland's. And that's one of the files that I read was the intelligence investigation which basically told a story that was never released.

And those files still are locked up. They'll never be released. If they're still have somebody hasn't destroyed or taken them, but under the California Freedom Information Neck you can't get them. I tried getting some a few years ago, just not on this case, but on cases that I worked where I initiated the intelligence operation. I wrote about it in all the reports. I closed it and it was done.

I got a hold of LAPD, I filed with them for it, and they just came back and said, no, under California lah blah blah blah, those are all considered active investigations, so we don't have to disclose anything. And it was really kind of humorous because I asked them one. I said, well, now the cases on and I named off three organized crime guys who were killed in the forties and fifties. And when I talked to their guy, he said, well who are they? And I told them

he says, well, no, those are still active investigation. I said, the guy has been dead for seven years. How could it be an active investigation. Everybody around him, the family, they're all dead. Understate, all those are active investigations, so we don't release anything. So that's the situation. They conducted all these investigations. They did the same with the Black

Dallia murder. I knew a guy who worked intelligence who was on the Black murder case as an intelligence guy, and they did things that were so far out of the norm and illegal even at the time most people would be stunned by it. But they also learned the intelligence guys who actually killed the Black value. They knew they uncovered that, and they went so far as that they kidnapped him for over a week trying to get him to confess, but he wouldn't, but they knew it

was him, and they eventually had a cutting loose. But all of that stuff is locked up and we'll never see the light of day.

much more emphasis on celebrity. But in that emphasis on the celebrities that they surveyed, there was always an organized crime connection wasn't there.

like a snatcher. It's no secret today he had some connections, but some of the other celebrities, like well, Jack Lemon, he was the one there's a huge fought on and the reason being is that one day when he was he came into LAX, because there was always a squad of O CID guys at LAX watching who's coming and going on the aircraft, the various planes, and so he came in and some people came up to him, you know, introduced to say oh hello miss and blah blah blah.

And what happened there was a pseudo low level mob guy. Mob associates say, who is flying to Vegas? And he walked out to him and shook hands and that was it. Jacquelin didn't know who this guy was and walked away, but that was enough to justify putting the Lemon and file and completing a full dossie on him and monitoring everything you could on him from that day forward. And so that's what they did. With politicians. Sometimes that wasn't

even a connection, a weak connection like that. It was just a matter of so and so as mayor, so and so as governor. As an example, Garry Brown when he was governor the first time in California, I was involved with some surveillances when he would come from Los Angeles, and he had to remember there are no cell phones. They just had a few people have radio phones in

their cars. He had one as the governor, and there was an OCID associate who was more of an informant, and he was able to intercept all of Jerry Brown's telephone calls when he made it from the car, and so he would give those to OCID. Here's what the Governor's talking about, who he's talking to, and all this stuff. Oc I didn't didn't complain because it was intelligence. But what was interesting is that Darryl Gates hated He just absolutely hated gays, and if he thought any cop was

gay or even got closer, he had fired them. Haven't fired. But anyway, he thought over ten thousand percent of Terry Brown was gay. So we had to set up information

gathering to try to prove that he was gay. And it went so far is that there was a some sort of little publication made some comment about Brown going down meeting with this attorney who was gay in Mississippi, and because of that, Gates sent his number one OCID guy who only gathered information on politicians, down to Mississippi to try to get the information to prove that Brown was gay so he could blackmail him with it. He never got anything, but he was trying desperately. Also on

John Vandicap was the district attorney in La. Then he became the ag of California, and I was working on this guy who was an organized crime figure from Chicago. He lived in Laguna Beach, California, and the FBI had a pen register on his phone which shows telephone numbers that are called and come in well going through it

from this beach house. This mob guy called that number, but it lasted for about fifteen to twenty thirty seconds, so it was apparently a wrong number because the number following that on this list the FBI gave us was one digit off. So the guy hung up calls that number in chats for about half hour, so we knew it was just probably a misstyle. Well that went up

to Gates's office. Gates learned about it in the intelligence briefing, and he ordered us to immediately go down to this beach house and start running surveillances on it, because Laguna Beach was known as a gay en play man. And Gates said, if he's got a house there, he's got to be gay. I want you guys to prove it, find out, and we're going. Hey, we looked at the property. The house had been in their family for decades, and

we said, you know, there's nothing to it. So we got permission too if we wanted to rent a yacht to anchor it off the beach so we can watch it and not be conspicuous. But we went down there. I was running surveillance and I said, I said, this is nuts, just as crazy. And so I walked over to the house. It was on the beach front and I looked at it and it was covered with cobwebs and spider webs and leaves and debris all around the front door, the entry door. Nobody had been there probably

a month, if not a year or so. So we went back before that to the captain, Hey, this is just to waste the time, and so forth. He talks to the Gates about it, and Gates just said, no, keep an eye on that guy. Vandicamp because I want to know if he's gay, and I want to have the evidence. And because once again Gates was into doing what jaegor Hoover did, and that is black mainly people to get them to do what he wanted. And that's what OCID was doing. We were gathering information on people

of that. The news media, they were a big target for us. We were in surveillances on oh geez, the it was Shelby Coffee who headed the La Times. He's the editor. Their surveillances run on him. He was watched every time he went to lax and what flights he went on on and came in on, as was Lou Wasserman, the head of MCA at the time, and anybody liked that,

any politician. We would go to the airport, the airport crew, they would read all the rosters who was coming up, coming in or going out on any flights, especially on Western airlines going to Vegas, and it was all report to the chief because that's what he wanted. But it's was a complete invasion of everybody's privacy, as you can imagine. But that's what LAP Intelligence had been doing for decades, literally decades.

in Mexico. He was head of the Federal Allies and he was also the middleman between the CIA and the Contrast for weaponshipments. And what Arturo did is that he set up some clandestine airstrips through Mexico so the CIA flights heading down could land if they needed, refuel if they needed, and then make their way in to deliver their arms and coming back. They had a deal where he would load the planes up with drugs and they were flown back in. We knew that for a fact.

We confirmed that with some CIA guys that we were working with on joint operations and anyway, so that's what he was doing, and obviously it's completely illegal on a

number of fronts. But after I had a meeting in the desert one night, I came home and this is just shortly after I interrogated Lawford, and as I was pulling up my house about right around midnight, a motorcycle pulls up next to me empt these what I was told was a machine pistol, probably a Ruger converted to full automatic twenty two into the driver's side, and I saw that silhouette of a hand with a gun coming at me just before the shot went off, and I

just jerked the car to the right, hit the brakes, and I went down dirt embankment and I could hear the popping everything like that, very rapid, and before the car came to arrest in this dirt field, I jumped out because I didn't want to be stuck in a car, because like being in a rolling coffin and when I jumped out, I however, I twisted and hit I damaged my spinal cord and I just couldn't move my legs at that stage, and they were numb, and all I

remember hearing was some guy running through the brush because it was heavy brush towards me, and I thought it was the shooter coming to finish me off. I had a gun stretched my leg, a little two age thirty eight, but I couldn't reach it, and I just knew that was the end of me. I said, I just thought this is the shooter coming to finish me off. Well it wasn't. Fortunately he was a fireman who lived nearby and he heard the crash. But from that time forward, as soon as I got they took them to a

trauma center and they're treating me. My lieutenant shows up and he says, Okay, here's what I want you to do. And you know, I'm laying on a gurdy right in the emergency room. He says, yeah, when the guys get here from Huntington Beach there, they're going to do the investigation. Don't tell them anything you're doing. Don't tell them anything about derasal, don't tell them anything about this, don't tell anything about that, and I go, what what are you

talking about? Somebody just tried to kill me and you're telling me to lie to the investigators and being a good cop at the time, you know, following direction. I asked him why. She said, I'll tell you later, and he says, part of the reason, he says, those guys we know they're in the pocket of the mafia, the Huntington Beach detectives. I was dealing with them, not the same guys, some other detectives there on some other cases,

and I thought, this is this is friggin nuts. And so it just continue that way and it was just a huge onslaught of LAPD trying to crush the story that I could release. And matter of fact, they had such power with the media. Here it is you have an undercover copy and ambushed at his house, right and not you think that would make the newspaper be a major story. Current never appeared at anything. They kept it

out of the media. And then it just got very very strange what they started doing and ordered me to do. And they burglarized, which was interesting. They burglarized our house twice because they were obviously very worried that I had documents that would sink them, meaning the chief of police and you know, possibly the contra thing at the time. And sure, yeah, they broke in twice. One time was rather sing because they conspired with the local PD. Because

I was three hundred and fifty miles away. And this isn't just weeks. This went on for about eighteen months. Two years after this stuff was going on, and I was at three hundre and fifty miles away with some people. My wife was at work. The local police go to our house and there's a detective unit there and just happened to be that there's a retired LA cop living down the street and he's watching this. He says, he sees them talk to the guy in the patrol car.

He drives away. They walked to the side of our house, break in the bedroom window, sets off the alarm, and he says, within a minute or so the alarm was deactivated. Well, the only person knew how to deactivate the alarm was my former partner in intelligence who helped me install it. And so my attorney, because I already filed suit against LAPD contacts for police in Huney and Beach. He says, Okay, this is what happened. He says, Well, you know what happened.

We got a nine to one to one call from that house and the person said they're going to kill themselves, and then the person hung up and she goes, okay, he says, then we called back, meaning the PD called back and the person picked up the phone and just hung it up. That supposedly came from our house, right, Well, the only living thing that was utter house was a puppy we had, well that was in the yard, wasn't in the house. So that was the excuse to break in.

But they didn't break in. It was LPD who broke in. And later a guy from OCID came to me and he said, here are the guys who broke in your house, and this is why. And they were looking. They're terrified

that I had documents, and so that happened. Also some intelligence guys when I was still in the hospital in a private room under obviously in the assumed name and so forth and guarded, they came in and they told me that yes, I was a target of the assassination, but my wife was also targeted to be assassinated.

in the media yet, and so I said. The deal was that the person who shot it, tried to kill me, was already back in Nicaragua the following day, and that my wife was targeted because they wanted to send a message, a very strong message that anybody trying to interfere with this was going to be killed because it was such a huge narcotic trafficking thing too, and that would have sent a message to everybody. A cop and his wife

get assassinated. But yeah, it was. It was very bizarre, very bizarre, and it's a long story, but you know, it was a frightening story at the time.

interactions with Marilyn Monroe. It's very interesting too when you talk about how serious they were to keep a lid on this when you write about Dorothy Killgall a columnist, and what happens with her, and it seemed that there is some again overreached by government here that they intervene and have something to do with Dorothy's demise.

And so you see that, you say, okay, we're there. They were authorizing the siity to kill these various people though someone were leaders of various countries. Would they hesitate at killing an actress, you know? And the answer would be who's expendable then the president or Maryland, and it would be Maryland. What is interesting, though, is why Robert actually came out that night and met with her and

gave her that drink whatever's in it. Why he did that, But I think from reading all the intelligence on it is that they were so concerned she was going to go public so quickly they had to do that just to keep her from going public. But at the time, there were other ways they could have handled her. They could have got any psychiatrists and they would have just

committed her to a mental institution. It was very easy to do back then, and they would have just drugged her up, kept her in their six months or a year, and then when they released her, no matter what she said, they would all, poor Maryland, she's lost her mind. You know, she's in an institution, using a lot of drugs there. She's just completely confused about the world. It didn't have to be done the way it was.

being truthful. Watching him, I'm absolutely convinced he had no prior knowledge of this what was going to happen to her. And without question, I believe that guilt followed him for the rest of his life, got him heavily into drugs and alcohol. It really destroyed the man carrying that burden. And I know he blamed them, but he never really came out saying. And I know when he was dying about two that's probably about two or three years after I interrogated him. He was in the hospital dying and

some reporters were there. They said, tell us about you and Maryland and Robert could. He refused to talk about He would he wouldn't talk about even Ben. Yeah, but it's just, you know, just the whole story is, it's just very sad.

it was, Yeah, exactly. I want to thank you very much Mike roth Miller for coming on and talking about your latest Bombshell, The Night Bobby Kennedy Killed Marilyn Renau. You know that you're all over Amazon with all your other previous work, and how might anyone else find out about this book?