The Mafia, Orgies With Marilyn and the English Link to JFK's Assassination

     

Browsing through the FBI files on Edward Kennedy – a 2,352-page dossier whose release last week casts new light on the violence and sexual chicanery that were the staples of daily life for America’s ‘first family’ – I came across one intriguing report which has been overlooked.

Logged in April, 1970, it concerns a tip-off from a man claiming to be a long-standing Mafia member based in London. In two typed letters postmarked Wimbledon and addressed to the FBI’s Dallas office, the informant recounts how he became embroiled in the plot to murder President John F. Kennedy seven years earlier – and warns that his youngest brother, Edward, is next on the Mob’s hit-list.

‘In 1961 I attended a general meeting of the Mafia, during which the main discussion was the killing of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King,’ writes the tipster, whose name has been blanked out of the file for obvious reasons. ‘Although you may have closed your file on the killing of the President, you are wrong. The man who actually killed him, also the man who paid the killer, is alive and at this moment preparing to kill Senator E. Kennedy (JFK’s younger brother Teddy) and Mr Nixon (then newly installed in the White House).’

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Claiming to have harboured JFK’s hit-man in England for three years after the president was shot, the tipster says his conscience is troubling him and offers to help the FBI trap the assassin. But he pleads with them to preserve his confidentiality ‘for if any of this leaks out I am a dead man’.

Frustratingly, the outcome of the Wimbledon letters inquiry is not recorded. And, of course, Edward Kennedy did not fall to a hit-man’s bullet all those years ago, like JFK and his other brother, Robert, who was shot in a Los Angeles hotel in 1968. The youngest of the trio died only last summer; then a florid-faced, white-haired old man of 77, he finally succumbed to a brain tumour.

However, the very fact that these reports were read personally by the FBI’s legendary director, J. Edgar Hoover, who ordered his London-based agents to meet the informer and fully investigate his story, tells us they were taken very seriously.

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Reading this historic archive – which has just been made public under U.S. freedom of information laws, despite an attempt to keep it secret by Ted Kennedy’s widow, Victoria – one understands why.

Despite the banal and grammatically flawed language of the ‘G-men’, as the bureau’s gumshoes are known, one can almost reach out and touch the vicious hatred directed towards carousing Senator Teddy and his clan of playboy politicos.

Over the years the FBI received many tips that the Mafia were out to get Teddy and conspiracy theorists will make much of this. They will no doubt claim it reinforces a long-held theory – that JFK was not murdered by a lone gunman (Lee Harvey Oswald), but was the victim of a Mob hit, and perhaps even Robert Kennedy, too.

The Mafia certainly held many grudges against the family, dating back to the days when patriarch, Joseph Kennedy, made his fortune with their help in Boston. But they became disgruntled after allegedly rigging a key election in JFK’s favour in Chicago in 1960. They expected the favour to be returned, but once in office he determined to put an end to organised crime, and as his attorney general, Robert, spearheaded his war on the Mafia.

But the death threats against Edward began even before he entered the U.S. Senate, as a young man of 30, and came from almost every quarter of American society. His innumerable enemies included embittered Vietnam War veterans angered by his ‘Commie’ views; Irish Protestants infuriated by his support for the IRA; white supremacists such as the Ku Klux Klan; plus the plethora of deranged loners who simply wanted to get him because he was a Kennedy.

Then there were the many moralists, outraged by the married Kennedy’s serial womanising and in particular his reprehensible behaviour after the affair which forever sealed his reputation as a self-serving coward . . . the death of pretty 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, whom he left to drown when his car plunged off a bridge following a drunken party at Chappaquiddick.

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Yet, much as the FBI files tell us about Edward Kennedy, they are perhaps more illuminating about the enigmatic Hoover, who founded the organisation in 1935 and remained in charge until his death 37 years later.

Plainly obsessed with the Kennedys, he was desperate to know every detail of their lives. A closet homosexual, Hoover was particularly interested in their innumerable sexual adventures, which at once fascinated and repulsed him.

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One can well imagine the goggle-eyed director, arguably the most influential figure in America’s corridors of power, solemnly perusing the latest through-the-bedroom-keyhole account, hot off the telex from one of his agents.

Best-selling Kennedy author Christopher Andersen attributes the FBI chief’s prurient interest in Teddy partly to the fact that his organisation failed to protect JFK and Robert. But, as he remarks: ‘If we didn’t already know the Kennedys were a bizarre combination of Camelot and the Borgias, we surely do now.

‘FBI agents doggedly recorded every rumour, every overheard conversation, every titbit of gossip and innuendo. No matter how unreliable or even silly a tip was, it wound up in the files.’

Indeed so. All-embracing as they are, the newly released files only cover the years from 1961 to 1985. But from the first log it is clear that Ted Kennedy was singled out for the sort of attention we might expect in a police state, not the world’s greatest democracy.

One early report, made in 1961, records Ted Kennedy’s fact-finding visit to Central and South America. On his way home, he left his diary on the plane and it was found by a cleaner. Very conveniently, though, it was not returned to its owner, but to the prying FBI.

Every scrawled page is duly photocopied and filed, and at the height of the Cold War it isn’t only Kennedy’s earnest admiration for Venezuelan socialism that raises eyebrows at the bureau’s Washington HQ. ‘11.30. Return to hotel – see ****,’ Kennedy has scribbled in the diary, the name of his late-night companion having been erased presumably to spare her blushes.

‘We have night-cap and hit the sack at 12.00.’

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June 25, 2010