Reclaiming History (212 page)

And it’s not because Bowers wasn’t trying to recollect suspicious activity. In fact, he wrote in his affidavit about seeing three separate cars in the parking lot behind the fence that attracted his attention, one at 11:55 a.m. with an out-of-state license plate and a “Goldwater For 64” sticker on it, one at 12:15 p.m. whose driver seemed to have a “mike or telephone in the car,” and another one a few minutes later that also had a Goldwater sticker on it. In his Warren Commission testimony, he said that the area between his tower and Elm Street “had been covered by police for some two hours. Since approximately ten o’clock in the morning, traffic had been cut off into the area so that anyone moving around could actually be observed.” The Dallas police and sheriff’s office did not report seeing any suspicious cars in the area, but Bowers apparently saw three that attracted his attention. So three cars in the parking lot behind the picket fence, all of which he said left the parking lot
before
the shooting, were suspicious enough to mention in his affidavit, but the suspicious activity
right behind
the picket fence
at the very time
of the shooting was not. Right. Later in the afternoon of the assassination, Bowers was interviewed by the Dallas County Sheriff’s Department as well as the FBI and again spoke of the cars, but not one word about the suspicious activity right behind the picket fence.
⁸⁸
But four months later, for the very first time, Bowers remembers all the “out of the ordinary activity” behind the picket fence. Lee Bowers finds his way into virtually all conspiracy books on the assassination, but one would have as much luck finding a reference in
any
of these books to Bowers’s failure to mention (in his affidavit and two interviews on the day of the assassination) his seeing any suspicious activity behind the fence as finding hair on a bald man.

Bowers couldn’t describe what he saw for the Warren Commission. But when conspiracy theorist Mark Lane interviewed him on March 31, 1966, over two years after his Warren Commission testimony, Bowers became a poster child for recovered memory. Suddenly, he remembered what he saw that attracted his attention. It was “a flash of light or smoke.”
⁸⁹
*
To paraphrase the song “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” a lot of smoke would have to get in one’s eyes to believe Lee Bowers. If Bowers hadn’t died when his car struck a bridge abutment near Midlothian, Texas, in August of 1966, it probably would have been just a matter of time before he had Jack Ruby with a machine gun on the grassy knoll.

S
etting aside the whole area of the recovery of unconscious memories and perceptions (hypermnesia), we know, as an almost ironclad rule, that accurate memories of an event or statement tend to fade with time.
†
So how do we deal with the many Warren Commission witnesses like Bowers whose memory supposedly got better with time? Assuming their first statement was intended to be a complete one, and there is no question that the witnesses said what they are reported to have said, we must, almost by definition, reject
sensational
additions to their original story.

Are these “additions” by witnesses in the Kennedy case always flat-out lies on their part? In many cases, yes, just as some of their original statements are often completely fabricated in the hope of getting five minutes of fame or attention. But many times, witnesses are not knowingly telling a falsehood. As time goes by, they naturally forget some of what they saw or heard, and these new voids in their memory are frequently filled in with details derived from the power of suggestion or their own imagination, or from knowledge of later events that make the details more likely or even inevitable, or from the recollections of others that witnesses unconsciously embrace as their own—that is, the witness ends up saying he saw something that he himself never saw. David L. Schacter, professor of psychology at Harvard University, says that in these cases, “with the passage of time, memory shifts from a reproduction of the past to a reconstruction of it.”

As author Elizabeth Loftus says about the passage of time causing memories to fade, “In its weakened condition, memory, like a disease-ridden body, becomes especially vulnerable to repeated assaults [of information from others].”
⁹⁰

With so many people trying to attach themselves, in some way, to the biggest murder case in American history, the addition of new elements to their stories, particularly important details that would never have been omitted by them in the original telling if they were true, has to be taken, as they say in Latin,
cum grano salis
(with a grain of salt). One has to be highly skeptical of witnesses who, for no convincing reason, tell their story about some aspect of the Kennedy case for the first time years later.

No hard and fast rules can be employed, without exception, to determine the credibility of the various witnesses dealt in this book other than the dictates of logic and common sense.

As Warren Commission member Allen Dulles put it back in 1966, if the Warren Commission critics find an assassin other than Oswald, “Let them name names and produce their evidence.”
¹
Since that time, the critics and conspiracy theorists have indeed named names—eighty-two at last count—but haven’t produced one single, solitary piece of credible evidence connecting any of these other alleged assassins to Kennedy’s murder.

In the conspiracy section of this book, I set forth the list of eighty-two men who one or another conspiracy theorist has alleged assassinated Kennedy. I feature some of the more prominent ones on the following pages. Among them are a few nuts, publicity seekers, and those after easy money who actually volunteered the fact that they themselves killed Kennedy or knew someone who did.

I should candidly acknowledge that I will not include in this section allegations of other assassins that are just too difficult for me to debunk. For instance, conspiracy author Milton William Cooper alleges, as others have, that America and the world are controlled by the American Council on Foreign Relations (Henry Kissinger, Dr. Edward Teller, David Rockefeller, etc.) and the international Trilateral Commission, which, he says, included, at the time of Kennedy’s assassination, American members like George H. W. Bush, John McCloy, and Dean Acheson. These groups learned of space aliens invading the United States and apparently had no objection to them, even establishing, with selected Americans and representatives of the Soviet Union, a joint lunar base with the aliens. One of these leaders, George H. W. Bush, who at the time was president and CEO of the offshore division of Zapata Oil, based in Texas, started to traffic in drugs with the CIA, the CIA controlling “most of the world’s illegal drug markets.” When President Kennedy found out about this as well as the aliens, he issued an ultimatum to Majesty 12, a permanent subcommittee of the National Security Council dealing with alien issues, that if the subcommittee did not clean up the drug problem, which was destroying American youth, he would reveal to Americans the existence of aliens among us and the base we established with them on the moon. Members of Majesty 12 decided they had to kill Kennedy, which they did on November 22 by having the driver of the presidential limousine, William Greer, shoot him. The reason why I can’t knock this theory down is that Cooper says he has a special copy of the Zapruder film, which I don’t have, that clearly shows Greer shooting Kennedy. How can I refute photographic evidence, particularly when I don’t have access to it?
²

Now for the assassins I am willing to challenge.

H
ugh C. McDonald, a former chief of detectives for the Los Angeles County sheriff’s office, says in his little pocket book,
Appointment in Dallas
, that he traveled almost fifty thousand miles through ten countries for close to two years to track down Kennedy’s assassin. When, he says, he had just about “run out of cash” and was “eating my credit cards,” the chase bore handsome fruit. In a room at the Westbury Hotel in London in June of 1992, the assassin, whom he named Saul (McDonald tells his readers that Saul was the man whose picture was taken by the CIA outside of the Russian embassy in Mexico City in October of 1963, and was erroneously believed to be Oswald in an early, internal CIA memorandum), and who McDonald says was a paid killer and soldier of fortune who participated in the Bay of Pigs invasion, bared his soul to McDonald. A man named Troit, representing powerful interests, had paid him (Saul) fifty thousand dollars to kill Kennedy. Saul said he killed the president with frangible bullets, firing from the second floor of the County Records Building on Houston Street. Oswald was set up to be the patsy, firing “cover shots” from the Book Depository Building, and the plan was that the Secret Service would fire back at Oswald and miss, but Saul would then kill Oswald and the Secret Service would have gotten the credit for it. “I don’t know why they didn’t fire. I seemed to have him [Oswald] in my cross-hairs for an eternity,” Saul tells McDonald.

Since there is no statute of limitations for murder, why would Saul confess to a murder for which he could get the death penalty? “You just don’t kill the President of the United States, walk away from it and then not mention it to anyone forever,” McDonald writes. That answer certainly satisfies me, Hugh. McDonald, who goes out of his way to inform his readers about his credentials, background, and many friends and connections in law enforcement, even referring to the congratulatory wire he received from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover when he retired, did not take his explosive information to the authorities. Why not? “Who would listen?” he asks his readers. No one, Hugh. No one. But at least you got to tell your story in a book.
³

T
hree alleged Corsican hit men hired by the mob to kill Kennedy were memorialized in the disgraceful documentary
The Men Who Killed Kennedy
. The initial four-part, two-hour British production (there have been five subsequent episodes under the same title,
The Men Who Killed Kennedy
, but different subtitles) was first shown in England on October 25, 1988, and discredited there shortly thereafter
⁴
(see following). The documentary wasn’t shown in America until October 1991 on the A&E cable network and has been shown many times in the United States since then (since 1996 all segments or episodes have been shown on the History Channel). It has been very popular, having been viewed by an estimated 100 million people worldwide.

The highlight of the “documentary” is
Part 4
, where the producer, Nigel Turner, is nice enough to tell us who killed Kennedy. He does this through a Hollywood scriptwriter, Steve Rivele, who, we are told, devoted almost four years of his life (since 1985) to getting to the bottom of the case. Rivele, the film says, “was given the name [by conspiracy theorist Gary Shaw] of a French drug smuggler in prison in the United States who, it was rumored, had some first-hand knowledge of the President’s assassination.” His name? Christian David, who, Rivele tells the audience, was “a member of the old French Connection heroin network and then the leader of a Corsican drug trafficking network in South America called the Latin Connection.” In exchange for Rivele’s promise to help him find an attorney to resist deportation to France after he finished his drug-trafficking sentence at Leavenworth federal penitentiary here in the United States, David agreed to start giving Rivele information about the assassination.

Rivele says David told him that there had been a conspiracy to murder the president, and in May or June 1963, in Marseille, France, he had been offered the contract to kill Kennedy, “but turned it down.” Rivele’s help was ineffectual and David was deported, but Rivele followed him to a Paris prison (Fresnes prison, and later La Santé prison, where he was awaiting trial for the murder of a police officer—he was subsequently convicted) to continue to interrogate him. Since there was nothing, at that point, that Rivele could offer David for his earth-shaking information, why would David snitch on the murderous conspirators, the type of people, we can assume, who usually have rather harsh ways of dealing with canaries? Rivele comes up with this non sequitur: David talked out of “the fear that he would either be committed to an asylum [in view of the psychotic fairy tale David tells, that part I certainly do understand] or that he would be convicted of an old murder charge.” Say again?

Eventually, through David and Michel Nicoli, a former drug trafficker turned DEA informant to whom David referred Rivele for corroboration of what he told Revele, Rivele came up with a whopper of a story. (It should be noted that by the time of their story, all of the hollow and hallowed conspiracy allegations—several professional assassins, not a lone gunman; Kennedy killed in a cross fire; head shot fired from grassy knoll; Badge Man; frangible bullet; Mafia behind the assassination; etc.—were very well known, and David’s and Nicoli’s story, as told by Rivele, conveniently “corroborated” all of them.)

Here is the story: The assassins of Kennedy “were hired on a contract [by the Chicago mob] which had been placed with the leader of the Corsican Mafia in Marseille,” Antoine Guerini, in May or June of 1963. Guerini was asked to supply three professional, “high-quality, experienced killers.” Rivele tells the TV audience that in the fall of 1963 the three killers were flown from Marseille to Mexico City where they spent three or four weeks at the house of a contact in Mexico City. They were then driven from Mexico City to the U.S. border at Brownsville, Texas. They crossed the border using Italian passports. They were picked up on the American side of the border by a representative of the Chicago Mafia with whom they conversed in Italian. They were then driven to Dallas where they were put up in a safe house. They spent several days taking photographs in Dealey Plaza, and in the evening they studied the photographs, et cetera, et cetera. Kennedy was killed in a “cross fire,” Rivele said. Two of the assassins were in buildings behind the president, and the fatal head shot was fired by Lucien Sarti, who—yeah, you guessed it—was in a uniform (remember the “Badge Man” in an earlier section?) behind the picket fence on the grassy knoll.
*
As soon as Rivele says this, a photo of the Badge Man is put on the screen. Lucien Sarti, the film wants you to believe,
was
the Badge Man, who, being the very experienced professional assassin that he was, didn’t try to escape after killing Kennedy, but instead jumped over the picket fence to kick Gordon Arnold for taking a photo of Lucien’s handiwork, and get the film from Arnold.

Rivele informs the TV audience that after killing Kennedy, all three killers went back to their safe house in Dallas, where they stayed for ten days before being flown by private jet to Montreal, and then back to Marseille. Rivele says the assassins were paid by the Mafia in heroin, which was converted into cash.

A very neat package. A brilliant investigation by a lone Hollywood scriptwriter, Steve Rivele, finally, after all these years, solved, we are told in the film, “one of the greatest murder mysteries of all time.” My only question is, Where was Rivele when the Warren Commission and the House Select Committee on Assassinations needed him? By the way, why the conspirators would risk telling David and Nicoli, who were
not
part of the conspiracy to kill Kennedy, all about it, right down to the finest details, is not known.

The Men Who Killed Kennedy
names Sarti, Roger Bocognani, and Sauveur Pironti as the three assassins from Marseille who killed Kennedy. The problem is that David, who is supposed to be the main source of all of Rivele’s information, publicly exonerated Bocognani and Pironti.
⁵
*

But we didn’t need David to say two of the three were innocent, which alone destroys the credibility of Rivele’s entire fable. Within two days of the October 25, 1988, debut of
The Men Who Killed Kennedy
in Britain, French authorities debunked the film’s claims as to all three alleged assassins. They ascertained that on the day of the assassination, Pironti was doing his national service onboard a minesweeper based at Toulon, Bocognani was serving time in the Baumettes prison in Marseille, and Sarti, the Marseille crook who is accused in the film of having fired the fatal head shot, was in Fort Ha prison in Bordeaux.
⁶

Upon hearing of the three solid alibis, the film’s producer, Turner, was undaunted and indeed confrontational. “We expected this. People have had 25 years to come up with alibis.”
⁷
But, of course, the three accused assassins didn’t “come up” with anything. French authorities ascertained the bona fide existence of the alibis. On the other side of the water, Steve Rivele, the writer, backed down quite a bit. “I [still] believe that Sarti was involved,” he said, “but apparently I was wrong on the other two.”
⁸
Only wrong on two-thirds of your story? That’s all? The charges in the film were so obviously false and lacking in support that several members of the British Parliament called for the revocation of the television franchise of Central Independent Television, the big British production company that had shown the film on the ITV network.
⁹

Central Independent Television, to defend itself against the mounting charges that it had been sold a bogus bill of goods by producer-director Nigel Turner and hadn’t demonstrated professional responsibility in checking the story before showing it on British television, immediately dispatched its own team of investigative reporters to France to verify if, indeed, the story was all hogwash. The investigators reported back that what the French authorities had said was correct, finding documentation to support the alibis of all three of the alleged assassins.
*
The
London Sunday Times
reviewed the file on the matter and reported that it “revealed evidence from Central reporters that the company had accepted half-baked theories from an American author who heard a story from a known liar trying to talk his way out of a jail sentence.” An internal memo from one of the reporters on the investigative team, Peter de Selding, said that the so-called documentary had “sullied the reputation of a serious broadcasting company.” The memo added that “ten days” of investigation “have turned up no evidence supporting the program’s accusations against the three men. On the contrary it has produced evidence that leaves the program’s conclusions in a shambles.” Another memo from another Central reporter referred to the show as “total nonsense” dreamt up by an “amateurish” American author from underground gossip. Another memo said, “We destroyed the allegations concerning the Frenchmen within a few days.” All three of the alleged assassins were found to be petty criminals.
¹⁰
†

When the show was broadcast in England in 1988, Sarti was dead (having been killed in a shootout with police in Mexico City in 1972), and Bocognani was somewhere in South America, but Pironti, still in France, told the French newspaper
Le Provencal
on October 26, 1988, “This is the most terrible moment of my life. It is wholly inexplicable. I agree that when I was younger I did things I should not have done. But I have paid for that. I was never a killer for the Mafia or anybody.”
¹¹
He told the
London Times
, “The only thing I know about Dallas is the soap opera I have watched on TV.”
¹²