“Prohibition was one of the longest, dumbest chapters in the history of 20th-century American folly, and the impulses behind it are still alive today.”
– by Pete Hamill in THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW,
– Sunday, March 11, 2007.
People from my generation (the so-called “Baby Boomers”) remember where they were when United States president, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, was assassinated on November 22, 1963. In my case, I was 16 years old and riding my bike down North Front Street towards the Post Office, where my dad worked, when I heard the news. I think I was near the Holy Redeemer School playground which is on the northern side of North Front Street.
If that was indeed so, it would be interesting, because right across North Front Street from that playground still stands the old office of Robert Sydney Turton, a mahogany and chicle contractor who was the richest man in British Honduras when he died in 1955. I wouldn’t be able to prove it in a court of law, but Turton was a bootlegger during Prohibition (the banning of alcohol) in the United States. And Joseph Kennedy, Sr., JFK’s father, was a big time bootlegger when the United States made alcohol illegal during the 1920’s.
Alcohol was not illegal in British Honduras, so big Belize merchants ran rum and whiskey in boats to the United States Gulf Coast – Corpus Christi, New Orleans, Biloxi, Mobile, Tampa, etc. Prohibition was an experiment in the United States which lasted from 1920 to 1933. The most important result of Prohibition was that it made the American criminal class very rich – the gangsters who would later be known as the Mafia.
Politics in the United States is really no different from it is in Belize. Up front there are the “face guys” – the politicians who go to church and live supposedly happy family lives. Behind the scenes are the shadowy, semi-legal types who supply muscle, provide fast money, and do the dirty work that is necessary in a game which has no rules.
Joseph Kennedy made a lot of money doing whatever he did, and he wanted one of his sons to be president of the United States. His first choice, Joe Junior, was killed in World War II, so he transferred his ambitions to John Fitzgerald, who attended America’s most prestigious university – Harvard, located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. John Fitzgerald Kennedy went on to become a Senator from Massachusetts, then defeated Texas’ Lyndon Baines Johnson to win the Democratic Party nomination for president in the 1960 election.
We Roman Catholic youth in Belize were pulling for John Kennedy, a Roman Catholic, to defeat the Republican candidate, Richard Milhous Nixon, which Kennedy did, very narrowly indeed. Kennedy became the first Catholic president in the history of the United States. Previously, Americans, the majority of whom are Protestants, had feared that a Catholic president would take orders from the Pope in Rome.
Anyway, the media and public relations experts in John Kennedy’s team did a sensational job of packaging and selling Kennedy as a young, brilliant, handsome, energetic candidate. When he became president, the Kennedy world, featuring his classy wife, Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, and their two young children, was photographed and written about as a perfect white man’s world – the legendary Camelot.
The reality was that JFK was a compulsive philanderer, that Mafia leaders had assisted in his election, and that his younger brother, Bobby, also a Harvard graduate, began to use his Attorney General appointment to hound and harass those same Mafia. The Chicago don, Sam Giancana, felt especially betrayed, because he had delivered Chicago to John Kennedy in the 1960 election.
In Florida, the Tampa-based Mafia don, Santo Trafficante, had lost a lot of money in Cuba after Fidel Castro’s 1959 revolution, because he lost gambling casinos and other expensive investments. Trafficante had not supported Kennedy in the 1960 election, and he became angry when Kennedy refused to provide air cover for the 1961 invasion of Cuba by Florida-based exiles. Without air cover, the Cuban exile invasion was crushed by Castro..
In New Orleans, several hundred miles west of Tampa down the Gulf Coast, the ranking Louisiana don, Carlos Marcello, was more than angry at Bobby Kennedy. Marcello, a Sicilian, was enraged. Kennedy had deported him to Guatemala in 1961, and Marcello had gone through humiliations in Salvador and Honduras before he managed to re-enter the States.
Americans had generally become sympathetic to the president during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, in which John Kennedy was seen as facing down the Russian leader, Nikita Kruschev. After the Russians backed off and removed nuclear missiles from Cuba, JFK’s popularity was very high. But not with Santo Trafficante, Carlos Marcello, and a man named James R. Hoffa, the most powerful union boss in the United States.
Jimmy Hoffa, as the unquestioned boss of the Teamsters union, was believed by many observers to be the second most powerful man in the United States, second only to the president.
Hoffa controlled billions in Teamster pension funds, which he had used to create exceeding leverage in American business and politics. Hoffa, in his climb to power and in his battles with the management giants of American business and industry, had forged alliances with various Mafia leaders. Bobby Kennedy had targeted the corrupt Hoffa for indictment, conviction and incarceration. But Jimmy Hoffa knew the Kennedys were not clean. He flat-out hated the Ivy-League educated Attorney General. Hoffa, a survivor of the tough streets, felt that the vice-president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, hated Bobby Kennedy as much as he did. Hoffa believed that if JFK got “wasted,” LBJ, as the new president, would bust Bobby Kennedy, thus taking the heat off Hoffa.
Interviewed right after the JFK assassination, the Muslim spokesman in New York City, Malcolm X, famously said, “The chickens have come home to roost.” The Muslim leader, Hon. Elijah Muhammad, decided to suspend Malcolm for 90 days to punish him for speaking “out of turn.” Malcolm, however, had simply spoken the truth. Elijah’s suspension of Malcolm led to a rift between the two which became worse and worse, until Malcolm himself was assassinated in February of 1965.
After I arrived in the United States in August of 1965, I began to reject the official story that a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, somewhat of a “weirdo,” had shot and killed JFK from a building in Dallas, Texas. I saw that it had been politically expedient for the American leaders to deny that there had been a conspiracy to murder John Kennedy. The United States would have been destabilized by a conspiracy revelation.
About ten years ago I saw a documentary on American cable television which showed, in a plausible way, how the deed was done. The JFK contract had gone to the Corsican Mafia. Three gunmen were brought into Texas through Mexico. After the hit, they spent a week under wraps before being taken out of the United States through Canada, thence back to Corsica.
I suggest you try to get a copy of a book titled MOB LAYWER, as told to Selwyn Raab, a reporter for The New York Times, by Frank Ragano, the lawyer for Trafficante and Hoffa during that critical time. The book was published in 1994 in New York by Charles Scribner’s Sons and in Toronto by Maxwell Macmillan Canada. MOB LAWYER puts some important pieces together. Trust me.