HOLY GRAIL #2?
Jumbo ate my homework, Mom. Swear!
This article is dedicated to the gallant Palestinian people, who deserve better.
A specter is haunting JFK study (and 9/11 study. And Iran-Contra study. And PROMIS study. And...well, you get the idea).
Ahem. A specter, I say, is haunting JFK study:
The specter of Isra*l.
What’s that? Coxey’s taken one too many roundhouses to the noggin, and you’re unfollowing faster than we can say “Yitzhak Shamir?”
Fine. Happy trails. But you’re gonna miss all the fun.
We’re knee-deep in the background reading on ol’ T-1000 Barfsack. (Honestly, his biography rubs up against enough deep state ops to sap 15 Sanity Points, but we’re bored to tears. The guy goes on about himself for 2000. Fucking. PAGES.)
But man does not live by bread alone. We’re bored, sure. More than that we’re enraged. Mostly at the US-facilitated genocide perpetrated by the Zionist entity. When that feeling overwhelms us, we...
Lowers voice to stage whisper, holds finger to lips
Research Isra*li conspiracy. Shhh! They’ll hear you.
If you’re here, you know what we mean. Isra*l’s the third rail of politics. The country, the concept, the politicians – doesn’t matter. It’s all verboten. Even nominally apolitical Americans who say boo about Isra*l get fucked.1
What if we told you: conspiracists avoid talking about Isra*l too, and for the same reason?
Conspiracy lit (at least the good stuff) exposes the ley lines undergirding our blood-soaked machine: Oglesby blazing the trail on inter-elite conflict. Al McCoy exposing* the heroin trade. Wendy Painting turning the OKC bombing upside down with PATCON. Gentlefolk and scholars, every one of ‘em.
But.
In this twilight kingdom of fearless rogues, there’s a oubliette labeled HIC DRAGONES SUNT. So far no one’s had the stones to venture in.2
The omission’s especially galling when it comes to JFK. Jackie-boy was at war with Isra*l even before he entered office,3 but the conspiracy literature avoids it completely or turns it into a footnote. And the government literature skirts it like we skirt taxes.
Don’t take our word for it. Proof’s in the pudding: USG did two investigations on JFK – the Warren Report (complete conjob), and the HSCA Report (partial conjob). They make totally opposite conclusions. Warren expects us to believe Oswald transmogrified into Annie Oakley and sniped 1.5 men with an abcracadabra bullet. HSCA disagrees – not so fast. Oswald had help.
Mic drop, right? Sorta.
As contradictory as Warren and HSCA are on the surface, dig a bit and you’ll find a common denominator: what they leave out. (Remember Peter Dale Scott’s X-ray? It comes in handy here.) That curated silence speaks volumes.
If you have time you can try it for yourself. Here’s the Warren Report. And here’s the HSCA (actually just the relevant bit, Part C). Ctrl+f a single word – a name, actually:
Lansky. G’head. We’ll wait.
Welcome back. What the fuck, right?
2000 pages and one piddling hit – some pantywaisted “Lewis McWillie had business ties to Santos Traficante, Carlos Marcello, and Meyer Lansky.”
That’s it. That’s all she wrote. Somehow this guy Lansky, whoever he is, merits zero mention in Warren and just one in the Richter-scale-shattering HSCA.
Why?
See, HSCA had problems. Lots of ‘em, going all the way to the top.
For instance. Robert Blakey, the Select Committee’s chief counsel, was a journeyman lawyer. Kind of itinerant, following the money hither and thither - some billable hours here, some there. Guy’s gotta eat.
Blakey’s gig just prior to HSCA is interesting. He wrote an affidavit4 in support of a libel suit against Penthouse by some nobody. Old-time mobster. Name wouldn’t even ring a bell unless you’re from Detroit and like, ninety:
Moe Dalitz.
Moe had roots in the Motor City. Deep ones.
He led Detroit’s Purple Gang, notorious bootleggers (uh-oh), mostly Jewish (double uh-oh) who HATED Joe P. Kennedy’s guts (triple uh-oh).5 After a couple scrapes, he went to Cleveland, although he remained a power broker in the D through the late 40s.
And Blakey vouched for this guy - not pro bono or anything, though even that would be suspicious as hell - right before heading up the biggest investigation into state crime in American history.
Small world.
Others have said it better and at length, so we’ll come right out and say it:
HSCA was a limhang. Pinned the tail on the wrong donkey.
See, their conclusion (groundbreaking though it was) boiled down to: OK, Oswald definitely didn’t act alone. He was part of a conspiracy to kill the president, in cahoots with Johnny Rosselli [DEAD before he could testify] Sam Giancana [also DEAD before he could testify]6 Carlos Marcello, slot machine king of New Orleans. Definitely him, and no one else.
LALALA WE CAN’T HEAR YOU. No one else, we said. Case closed!
We imagine Blakey machine-gunning the verdict into his microphone, feverishly banging his gavel, then sprinting out of the Capitol building into a chauffeured Rolls Royce. Handsomely rewarded for a job well done.
Kidding aside, HSCA deployed the conspiracy con job multitool: the ol’ misdirect. Marcello was the Don Corleone of the Big Easy, no doubt about that. He ruled New Orleans’s seedy underworld with an iron fist. Knew Oswald personally.7 But he wasn’t the big cheese Blakey pegged him as. That dubious honor belonged to Mr. “Single Mention in the Report” himself:
Meyer Lansky.
As the king himself puts it:
The Long-Weiss-Costello business deals which brought Costello's slot machines from New York to Louisiana contributed to a permanent alteration in the patterns of organized crime. On the local level, the slot machines conferred eventual wealth and influence upon Carlos Marcello, who at the time he was picked in 1934 was a twenty-two-year-old immigrant just out of jail for having robbed a grocery. As a right-hand man to Huey Long, Weiss "arranged payoffs to Long at the hotel from three members of the national crime syndicate, Frank Costello, Jake Lansky, and "Dandy Phil" Kastel."
The purpose of these payoffs was to consolidate a Louisiana slot-machine empire under Long’s protection. According to Messick, Jake's brother Meyer Lansky worked out the details face to face with Huey Long in Weiss's hotel. Marcello's first lucrative business was the slot-machine franchise for the west side of New Orleans; later, Marcello was cut into another Lansky-Costello operation, the posh Beverly Club casino.
Costello brought his financial adviser, Meyer Lansky, to New Orleans, where Lansky developed a national clearinghouse for underworld money-laundering. Lansky made financial history by opening accounts in Switzerland for Huey Long and the other principals, making a channel for the postwar flow of mob money to overseas havens from the Bahamas to Vanuatu.
[Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, p. 99]
So Marcello’s a nobody who got cut into a much larger operation - something big between Frank Costello, Seymour Weiss,8 Louis Costello, and our mystery man Lansky. But by 1963 Marcello was somehow the JFK job’s ringleader. And that, Blakey would have us believe, is a wrap.
Hang on. Left the X-ray machine in the back. Let me just find the dang switch...
STEP INTO THE X-RAY, PETER
Scott name-drops Lansky 126 times in Deep Politics, but his estimation’s pretty clear by mention #5:
Lansky’s the money man. In conjunction with other hoods (Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello are the marquee names, but there are others) Lansky took the Mafia and turned it into the Syndicate.
That transformation was a real-life Godfather Part II: Lansky started as a street-level NYC killer, but made money move after money move. Traded up human collateral. Allied with Italian gangs only to double-cross them later. Got in good with the Tammany political machine and blackmailed them. Rinse and repeat.
Insane feat. The kind of come-up you dream about. The coup de grâce, of course, was redirecting the money: Lansky diversified the mob’s revenue streams into every illicit piggybank. Slot machines? Hell yeah. Especially if a filthy-dirty governor’s involved. Heroin? You betcha, daddy-o. And most blasé, the universal solvent...
Hooch.
Remember, the Volstead Act made alcohol illegal from 1920-1933. Americans were still eager to drown their sorrows, though - and somebody had to manufacture and transport all that swill. Nevermind the opportunity to make an absolute mint.
Ever see Once Upon a Time in America?
It’s not far off: ethnic gangs in the Northeast and Midwest – Jewish, not just Italian9 – did the lion’s share of the bootlegging. That’s where Dalitz comes in (he entered Lansky’s orbit back in the 30s).10 That’s also how you get his and Lansky’s beef with Joe Kennedy: Joe was horning in on their action. Trying to get the mick magic going on their turf. Joe P. got caught, and was about to pay the ultimate price. He ended up trading his trump card to cancel the contract Lansky put out on him.11
So, prohibition ends. Lansky & Co. are richer than Croesus. Where’s the Isra*l connect?
Military nerds have a saying: amateurs study tactics. Professionals study logistics.
The biggest boon from bootlegging wasn’t the green - it was the connects. To ship illicit booze, Lansky had to know everybody up and down the production and distribution chains, from molasses makers to longshoremen, and make ALL of them look the other way. He pulled it off with ten thousand back-alley deals like the Huey Long one - actually, Long wasn’t even the biggest name in Lansky’s Rolodex. That title would probably go to Fulgencio Batista, Cuba’s pre-revolutionary dictator. Batista sold Lansky sugar and molasses (for making rum) and real estate (for building casinos on).1213 (Remember that old “the Mob killed JFK because they wanted their casinos back!” canard? It originates here.) As to the longshoremen, well - if On the Waterfront didn’t convince you, feast your eyes on this:
I. Irving Davidson14 told a future FBI informant, Joseph Hauser, "that he had known Marcello for years and knew he controlled the Teamsters and the Longshoremen in Louisiana."
[Davis, Mafia Kingfish, p. 464]
At one point the Longshoremen's local in New Orleans owned the building at 544 Camp Street.
[Scott, p. 103]
Marcello we already know – subordinate to Lansky, but part of the same network. After Lansky picked him off the street in 1934 Marcello worked his way up to running first the slot machines, then the whole New Orleans node.
The Syndicate owned the entire booze-making supply chain from soup to nuts. (Heroin- and gun-making chains, too, but hold your horses.) Naturally, their eyes got bigger than their stomachs. Lansky and the mob didn’t turn to the straight and narrow once Prohibition ended – they grafted remora-like onto the American cash cow.
Then, whaddaya know, the US government came calling. Scott again:
as America geared up to enter World War II, it was Lansky who worked with Naval Intelligence and OSS officers to help create Operation Underworld, "an Intelligence/Organized Crime project" which organized the mob's waterfront locals in the New York port area.
[Scott, p. 145]
Operation Underworld. Sound familiar?
It should. You’ve heard the pop version in high school: the government hired the Mob to run the docks during World War 2, heh-heh-heh.
True. FDR did hire the Syndicate to run the docks. Run them to do...what, exactly?
A few things, it turns out, from the intuitive to the oh-shit: ONI wanted mafiosi to crush strikes,15 ferret out supposed German saboteurs,16 and collaborate in the Allied invasion of Sicily (mostly by activating the motherland’s old-boy network and sharing intel on safe harbors). Nothing major.
Before we continue, an annoying pause:
We’ve been lying to you. Mea culpa.
The Lansky-Luciano-Thomas Dewey-J. Edgar Hoover (yep) nexus is more convoluted than we’re giving it credit for. Underworld’s just one piece of the puzzle; we picked it because it explains the when of the Lansky takeover. To understand the how, we have to look at the drugs.
Underworld wasn’t Lansky’s first collab with the federal government. He’d been working the feds for years - they were so tight the FBI looked the other way while Lansky railroaded his main rival. Check this out:
Meyer Lansky...had in 1937 established a special relationship with both FBN [Federal Bureau of Narcotics] Chief Harry Anslinger and FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover, by arranging to turn over to them Louis Lepke Buchalter, who was then probably America's major drug trafficker, and designated by Hoover as "the most dangerous man in America.”...At that time Lansky's main narcotics operation was the Mexican one. It is known that the FBI and FBN had other informants in the Lansky-Meltzer syndicate, and these arranged for the government's indictment of Meltzer himself when he failed to make payments on "the original mob money invested in his Mexican scheme. [Bonus round: George Dexter White, of future Midnight Climax fame, worked for the NY FBN. He went on to be the main fed handling Operation Underworld. What a coincidence.]
[Scott, p. 145]
Speaking of “the mob” and its money. If there’s a moment when it stopped being an amorphous Italian-Jewish-Irish troika and became Lansky’s Syndicate, it was during this 1937-1946 stretch. Lansky already had Hoover eating out of his hand in the mid-30s. ONI’s cry for help was about to net him a big enough IOU to play for all the marbles.
The deal had always been, if the mafia provided the Sicily hookup, OSS would lean on Thomas Dewey to to spring Lucky Luciano from prison.17
Or should we say “spring:” they didn’t let Luciano go back to his days of white slavery18 in Manhattan. No siree. He was deported straight back to Sicily for life.19 It wasn’t a restful retirement, either: according to Luciano, Lansky immediately cut him out and took over everything.20
So long, (Un)Lucky. You had a great run. But now it’s Papa Lansky’s turn.
By the end of the war, Lansky had a legit empire on his hands.
You name it, he trafficked it: smack, booze, casinos, horses, shipping. Powerful men lined up to do his bidding - the lieutenants in every major metro.21 Mighty J. Edgar Hoover was in his back pocket.22
Best of all, he still had that firstborn-son pledge from a certain up-and-coming Irish-American political dynasty. After the freak death23 of Joe Jr., presumptive heir to the Kennedy throne, Joe P. had to call up the family’s second-string standard bearer:
JFK.
GREAT, MR. COXEY SIR. AND…?
So Lansky was crooked 6 ways from Sunday. He trafficked in every vice invented by man (and a few he didn’t). He had half the government, including the HSCA, running scared. And he got the hooks in early on JFK.
Sure, Coxey. Stupendous. But wasn’t this whole thing supposed to be some intrepid exploration of Isra*l?
Thought you’d never ask.
Again, mea culpa. We skipped a beat in Lanskys criminal CV, and it’s a big’un: old boy was a zealous Zionist. Like, “made Aliyah to Isra*l at the end of his life” zealous.24 “Writing letters to Ben-Gurion about Jewish resettlement” zealous. And, last, but certainly not least:
“Ran guns for the Yishuv [pre-Isra*l Zionist state] to enable the Nakba and tip the scales of the 1948 War” zealous.
We haven’t written on it formally yet, but we’ve been chasing this angle down for a while. In short – it’s real. A conspiracy of Jewish Zionists armed the paramilitaries planning the Nakba. Lansky was in charge of the logistics, but the bourgeois Sonnenborn Group handled the political wheeling and dealing. We’re talking bigshots here. The overworld to Lansky’s underworld - so well-connected they nabbed a meeting with Truman. They were crazy successful, too: the cabal got its hands on everything from .50 cals to B-17s. To hear military historians tell it, the illicit planes and guns decided the outcome of the 1948 war.
This one-two punch – master of the shadow world. Devout Zionist arms trafficker – leads straight from Lansky to the JFK assassination’s bagman. With no further ado...
You know him. If you're reading this you probably hate him. Ladies and gentlemen, allow us to introduce
LYNDON.
BAINES.
JOHNSON.
Or as we like to call him, Jumbo.
There’s a school of JFK conspiracism that insists LBJ – and LBJ alone – was the triggerman. (And the plannerman. And the moneyman. Half of them think he flew the plane out of Dallas.) We call it the Dad Brigade.
He had all the motives! they shriek. Under investigation for corruption. In deep with the Crown family. Controlled Dallas itself. The mob’s boy inside the White House. NSAM 273!
At “NSAM 273” they blow a gasket and have to take their Lipitor. But beneath the angina, the Dad Brigade does have a coherent narrative. It goes something like this:
Joe P. was crookeder than a tree root. The mob had a HUGE piece of him even before he enlisted them to help put JFK over the hump in 1960. They wanted something in return. Simple quid pro quo: you make our handpicked agent VP as an insurance policy to ensure Jackie-boy doesn’t go growing a conscience. But he did, and they were pissed, so they killed him. LBJ handled the gunmen and the whole city of Dallas.
Like all JFK theories, there’s truth to it. Especially the “handpicked agent” part:
the Marcello-Halfen group funneled at least $50,000 a year of the Marcellos’ gambling profits alone to Lyndon Johnson, and in return, Johnson helped kill in committee all antirackets legislation that could have harmed the interests of Carlos Marcello and Jack Halfen.25
That’s true, as far as it goes: back when he was a senator, LBJ played spoiler for the mob, killing every anti-organized crime bill that came up for debate.26 Thank you, Robert Caro.
That’s where the Dads’ argument ends. There. All tied up in a bow. At this point they cross their bowling-pin forearms and wait for you to crumble. But before you do:
Notice anything (or anyone) missing?
Exactly. Once again, the crime biographers cut the head off the snake. Lansky’s in Kingfish (and every other mob book the Dads have ever read), but he’s always an operative. A finance man. Never what he really was - the boss.
This half-assedness isn’t unique to the Dads, though. Kills us to admit, but even angels fear to tread there:
Thus, institutional as well as personal explanations must be sought for Lansky's immunity from prosecution, which only ended after Lansky apparently retired from his organized-crime activities (at an important mob meeting of February 1970 in Acapulco) and moved to Israel.
[Scott, p. 146]
Peter Dale Scott - the human encyclopedia who leaves no stone unturned - stumbles across a geode and just keeps walking. Lansky retired out the blue and fled to Isra*l. The end.
If you ctrl+f “Israel” in Deep Politics, you’ll get 11 other hits. But they’re all cursory: references to Somoza. I. Irving Davidson. The World Anti-Communist League. Important, sure. But Scott bends over backwards dodging the obvious question:
Why did Lansky have so much pull?
We’ve read that book a half-dozen times. Never found an answer.
Scott might be yellow-bellied on Isra*l, but his X-ray’s as handy as ever. Fire that bad boy up and some tantalizing clues start to emerge - the moneybags thing, for one. Even the Dad Brigade will grant LBJ was crooked from the jump:
Well, sure. Marcello started bankrolling Johnson when he was in the House. Jumbo was up to his eyeballs in mob money.
Again, true – but again they dust their hands and leave it there. Never asking the follow-ups: Was Marcello footing the bill, or was it someone above him? How exactly did this back-scratching arrangement start? And for what – what did LBJ, some backwoods yokel from Bumfuck, have to trade? The Syndicate already had booze, smack, and sexual blackmail. What else is there in the Sleaze Quadrivium?
You guessed it. Guns.
Before we lay it out, the de rigueur disclaimer:
“Isra*l did JFK” (or any permutation thereof) is radioactive because it’s been shitcoated to high heaven.27 And we do mean SHIT-coated: the most explosive “Isra*l-did-JFK” book, FINAL JUDGMENT, was written by Michael Collins Piper, a spooked-to-fuck neo-Nazi.28
All of which is to say, you can’t say it. They poisoned the well. Suggesting LBJ was the servant of a multilayered conspiracy utilizing decades-old ethnic connects to perpetuate deep geopolitical power? Nuh-uh. The third rail’s third rail.
But what if there was proof?
What if the sordid LBJ-Syndicate relationship led straight to Isra*l, and we could prove it. How would that redeem the shitcoated Isra*li angle of JFK?
How, indeed.
PUT UP OR SHUT UP
Deep in the Wayback Machine - so deep it was indexed on a Yahoo message board - we found a post claiming “LBJ [did] arms smuggling for the Jews.”
Uh-oh.
Nevermind the Boomer slur. We’d never even heard of such a thing. LBJ a gun-runner. What?
We started running it down. Or tried to - nothing came up. Goose egg after goose egg. No documents anywhere on the Internet implied LBJ smuggled a Derringer, let alone moved serious weight.
We spent weeks up past our bedtime searching in vain. Right when we were ready to call it quits a blip hit the radar:
A single PhD dissertation by some nobody - four years in the Navy. Bailed on academia after finishing his degree. But he wrote the thing on this very topic: Prologue: LBJ’s Foreign Affairs Background, 1908-1948.
Fuck yes. Archive.org, here we come!
Nothing. Nada. Fucking zilch.
This thing isn’t ANYWHERE online. Only two libraries in the country had it, both microfilm only - and only one would even loan it out. Plus they wanted money.
You know what happened next. We donated some extra plasma, forked over the scratch, and waited. And waited. And waited.
She finally came in last week – a 2” spool jam-packed with 514 pages of potential goodness. We stitched it together and made a copy. (God bless the public library system.) We’ll post it up on Archive once we finish.29
We say “finish” because we just started. We’re about 50 pages in right now, and feeling a little bit like when we first read Programmed to Kill - if even 25% of this is true, this is NOT the world I thought we lived in. (Turns out LBJ was raised in a philosemitic Christian cult intent on bringing about the Rapture and indoctrinated into “helping Jews wherever he could” by his Bible-thumping granddad and auntie, who he introduced to the West German chancellor during a high-stakes foreign policy meeting at his ranch).30
There’s some follow-up once the dissertation’s all said and done – Gomolek did significant original research and scored some major scoops (like, “interviewed JFK nemesis/Ben-Gurion’s BFF Abe Feinberg” major) which we’ll try to track down and interrogate for bias. X-rays ‘til the wheels fall off.
NO ILLUSIONS, OF COURSE. BUT MAYBE…
It’s JFK. Nihil sub sole novum and all that. This potential bombshell isn’t really new either – it’s old enough to rent a car.
But.
Nobody bothered to tackle it before. Or since, for that matter. Or comment on Gomolak’s stab at it.31 Or digitize it. Why?
We don’t know what to make of it yet, but this bad boy was disappeared for a reason. Could be banal. Or it could be the same forces currently genociding Palestinians armed the Nakba before snuffing out JFK and hijacking America into a Fourth Reich murder-suicide pact.
Buckle up, boys and girls. Time to touch the third rail.
Stay golden, Ponyboy. .من النهر إلى البحر
Especially if you’re a humble public servant in 38 out of 50 states. This poor soul got long-dicked by AIPAC for refusing to sign an anti-BDS pledge. o7, comrade.
dissuaded at least a little bit by the hammer of Thor being brought down on those who tried: Isra*l briefly won an injunction against Mossad vet Victor Ostrovsky’s tell-all By Way of Deception. Most attempts don’t even make it to the publisher.
depending on how you date it, the enmity goes back to 1957, when then-senator Kennedy endorsed Algerian independence, or 1960, when New York doyen Abe Feinberg shook him down for Middle East policy concessions. (We’re partial to the former, but the latter dialed their beef up to 11.) See Sy Hersh, The Sampson Option,p. 96-97: ”’As an American citizen [Kennedy] was outraged,’" Bartlett recalled, ‘to have a Zionist group come to him and say: 'We know your campaign is in trouble. We're willing to pay your bills if you'll let us have control of your Middle East policy.' "Kennedy, as a presidential candidate, also resented the crudity with which he'd been approached. ‘They wanted control,’ he angrily told Bartlett.
Mark Lane, Plausible Denial : was the CIA involved in the assassination of JFK?, p. 34. More on Lane’s divided loyalties in a moment.
Sam Giancana, Double Cross, p. 104: “They [the Giancanas] planned everything from political fixes and murder to getting fellow bootlegger Joe Kennedy out of a nearly fatal scrape with Detroit’s Jewish mafia, the Purple Gang.”
It’s not the focus of this article, but the convenient, repeated “Oops! He died” of HSCA star witnesses is bird-dogging par excellence. Dabbing on us.
Among other avenues, through Oswald’s uncle Dutz, a bookie.
Who we’ll revisit at some point. Weiss was high up in the Zionist network drumming up guns, lawyers, and money for the pre-state settlement project.
Irish too. Joe Kennedy’s Somerset Imports, for example, got to retain three choice distributors at Prohibition’s end: Gordon’s, Haig & Haig, and Dewar’s. See Giancana, p. 318.
William Roemer, War of the Godfathers: the Bloody Confrontation Between the Chicago Mob and New York Families for Control of Las Vegas, p. 31: “[Lansky’s partner Lucky] Luciano knew he could count on...a young Jew named Moe Dalitz. Dalitz has earned a widespread reputation as a bootlegger, not only in Cleveland but in Detroit, where he had been the admiral in the ‘Little Jewish Navy’ of rum runners from Canada.”
Giancana p. 104 & p. 323:
The Purple Gang had put a contract on the mick’s life for bringing bootlegged rum through their territory without permission, and Kennedy, fearful for his life, had gone to Chicago to beg Esposito to intervene on his behalf. [104]
Mooney turned to look him sqaure in the eye. “Let me see what I can do. But I want your word that the day your son is elected...that’s the day that—”
Kennedy interrupted: “That Sam Giancana is elected, too. He’ll be your man. I swear to that. My son...the President of the United States...will owe you his father’s life. He won’t refuse you, ever. You have my word.” [323]
See also Michael Milan, The Squad: The US Government’s Secret Alliance with Organized Crime, p. 150:
Ask Meyer about Joe Kennedy and you’d see one of the few times that Mr. L would actually get conniptions...Meyer was ready to bust a blood vessel. His temples were actually throbbing when Sam Koenig told him what Kennedy had said. And then Meyer, almost like he was a born Sicilian, swore a blood revenge on the entire family. “The sins of the father,” he kept on saying to himself, mumbling like an old zeydah vowing revenge. “The sins of the father.”
Robert Lacey, Little Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life, p. 108: “In 1938, Meyer Lansky took his gambling services to Cuba. Fulgencio Batista...wanted to boost the country’s gaming revenues...both the track and the casinos were doing badly, and it was Lansky’s job to help put them straight.”
I. Irving Davidson was a vital early figure in the Isra*l lobby, predecessor to today’s AIPAC. He worked behind the scenes on almost everything from bootlegging to gun-running, about which more in a moment.
Rodney Campbell, The Luciano Project: The Secret Wartime Collaboration of the Mafia and the U.S. Navy, p. 122:
So [Luciano attorney Moses] Polakoff contacted Meyer Lansky and asked him what he could do. According to Polakoff, “Mr. Lansky got a hold of somebody and I know that in a couple of days later, when I met Mr. Haffenden, he said, ‘Gee, you did a swell job. The strike was stopped.’...on a number of occasions, Haffenden called me on other things, and I usually got hold of Lansky, and he got hold of the proper people and the things he wanted were done.”
Again with the Lansky preeminence - it doesn’t sound like he was some minor player, or even a finance guy. Sounds like he was the boss. (He wasn’t, but only technically: Lucky Luciano was rotting in a prison cell at the time.)
The catalyst for deputizing the Syndicate was the 2/9/1942 torching of the Normandie in the middle of it being converted into a troop transport. The Navy immediately suspected sabotage. In our opinion, it was probably a false flag to give the Navy a little nudge in the right direction. See Gosch and Hammer, The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano, p. 174:
Albert said that the guys from Navy intelligence had been all over the docks talkin’ to °em about security...[Albert’s] idea was to give the Navy a real big hunk of sabotage, somethin’ so big that it would scare the shit out of the whole fuckin’ Navy. This big French luxury ship, the Normandie, was sittin’ at a pier on the West Side of Manhattan, and accordin’ to what Tony and Albert was told, the government was workin’ out a deal with that guy de Gaulle to take it over and turn it into a troopship. Albert figures that if somethin’ could happen to the Normandie, that would really make everybody crap in their pants.
“It was a great idea and I didn’t figure it was really gonna hurt the war effort because the ship was nowhere near ready and, besides, no American soldiers or sailors would be involved because they wasn’t sendin’ ’em noplace yet. So I sent back word to Albert to handle it.
“A couple days later, I heard on the radio where the Normandie was on fire and it didn’t look like they could save her. That goddamn Anastasia — he really done a job. Later on, Albert told me not to feel too bad about what happened to the ship. He said that as a sergeant in the Army he hated the fuckin’ Navy anyway.”
The Secret War Report of the OSS, p. 190-191: “Murray Gurfein...negotiated a deal with Lucky Luciano...that would enable the Mafia in Sicily to engage in clandestine operations in support of the Sicilian invasion. While this was not strictly speaking an OSS invasion - OSS was behind it. ...in return, on the very day World War II in Europe ended, a petition for executive clemency for Luciano was sent to Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York.”
Seriously, that’s what he was put in prison for. (It’s basically just sex trafficking.) There’s a decent amount of evidence suggesting Lansky has Luciano set up.
Gosch and Hammer, p. 184: “On January 3, 1946, Governor Dewey announced that Lucky Luciano would be freed — not to remain in the United States but to be paroled to his birthplace in Sicily.”
ibid., pgs. 120 and 283:
“Well, in Julius Caesar, you remember a guy by the name of Cassius? He was a pain in the ass. It seems like everybody’s got a Cassius in his life. And I got one, too — only his name is Vito Genovese.” He paused for a moment. “Come to think of it, I even had two Cassiuses in my life, the other one bein’ a guy by the name of Meyer Lansky. But I didn’t get on to him for a long time.” [120]
Lansky...was really tryin’ to be the boss of everythin’. It was just as clear as crystal to me what that little bastard was doin’. He was so hungry for power behind the scenes he’d kiss anybody’s ass and do anythin’ he had to do so that in the end, he — Meyer Lansky, my old partner and a Jew — would wind up the real boss of bosses of all the Italians and the Jews — and without a single fuckin’ vote on the council. I never really knew what it meant when we was kids and I used to call him the Genius. But at the age of sixty-four, I finally got wise.” [283]
Most prominently, Carlos Marcello in New Orleans, Sam Giancana in Chicago, Moe Dalitz in Cleveland, Bugsy Siegel in LA, and Jack Ruby in Dallas.
Old-school conspiracists pretty consistently point to Lansky’s sexual blackmail of J. Edgar Hoover to rationalize Hoover’s code of silence on the mob. It’s true but reductive: the coziness goes back way further. But while we’re on the topic, let’s take a gander - from Anthony Summers’s Official and confidential: The Secret Life of J. Edgar Hoover, p. 5:
Mafia boss Meyer Lansky...had reportedly obtained compromising evidence - probably photographs. Thereafter, until the Kennedy brothers attacked organized crime, Lansky bragged privately that Hoover had been “fixed.”
There’s no hard evidence of foul play, but the circumstances of Joe Jr.’s death are crazy suspicious. For one, FDR and Joe P. hated each other’s guts - and wouldn’t you know it, Joe Jr. and Eliot Roosevelt worked an experimental test flight together late in World War II. (Eliot followed behind, taking photos in a single-prop Mosquito. Joe Jr. flew the experimental deal.) About 5 minutes later, Joe Jr.’s plane exploded. Cui bono? For the whole sordid tale, see Laurence Leamer, The Kennedy Men, p. 215.
Although keeping it 100, that was an attempt to dodge tax evasion charges.
John Davis, Mafia Kingfish, p. 168.
Probably why Hoover preferred LBJ to JFK. It wasn’t just that LBJ didn’t have a shithead brother antagonizing Hoover’s blackmailers (though that was part of it) - he and LBJ were both bought and paid for. Hoover knew a kindred spirit when he saw one.
For any unaware - Welcome. FOR YOUR OWN SANITY, LEAVE! LEAVE NOW! – “shitcoating” is planting a version of the truth in the mouth of an unsavory character to taint it by association. There’s a million examples, but the classic is Alex Jones’s repeated declarations that the government did the Oklahoma City bombing. As with most shitcoats, it effectively killed the theory – and also as with most shitcoats, it was basically right.
Piper was a longtime writer for Liberty Lobby/American Free Press & its paper The Spotlight, all Willis Carto originals. Check out the dedication page of his book The New Jerusalem, where he eulogizes (count ‘em!) four Holocaust deniers, Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, Ezra Pound, and Charles Coughlin before claiming Tsar Nicholas II was butchered by “Zionist assassins.” He’s not alone, unfortunately - Mark Lane, author of the groundbreaking Rush to Judgment, was also was a Liberty Lobby intimate. Critical support though: he defended Spotlight from a lawsuit by E. Howard Hunt. (It backfired spectacularly. Hunt was outed as being in Dallas 11/22/63.) Lane was mostly rehabilitated, but Collins Piper’s still anathema. That’s the power of a good shitcoat – mention JFK and Isra*l in the same sentence, best-case scenario you’ll be laughed out of the room. More often you’ll be condemned as an anti-Semite.
And on the off chance we disappear before then, you’ll all get a copy two weeks post mortem.
Yes, we’re serious.
With the exception of an LBJ presidential library archivist. She takes issue with LBJ’s supposed Texas airlift to relocate Jewish refugees. So far, we haven’t found any objections to the Haganah gun-running.