Reclaiming History (269 page)

According to a 1944 FBI report, Dutz Murret was the operator of two illegal handbook (bookmaking) clubs in the French Quarter at the time. In these early years he also managed a few pro fighters, having been a boxer himself when he was younger.
¹⁰⁹
But that was almost two decades before the assassination. Was he still involved in gambling and bookmaking in the 1960s? Everyone seems to concede that point, but there doesn’t seem to be any hard evidence to support it. Indeed, the HSCA Report refers to Murret as a “minor” gambling figure in the 1940s and 1950s and “possibly” until his death in 1964.
¹¹⁰
But even “possibly” is too strong a word because the HSCA cites no evidence to support it for the 1960s. In fact, as far as I can tell, the report doesn’t offer any support for Murret being involved in gambling in the 1950s, only the 1940s. Citing Marguerite Oswald’s statement that Murret had been a bookmaker “for many, many years”
¹¹¹
doesn’t address itself to the issue since Marguerite only knew the goings on of her sister and husband in the 1930s and 1940s, not later.

And of course if Dutz Murret was just a bookmaker, at
some
time in his life, that wouldn’t help the conspiracy theorists. Their main argument is their claim that around the time of the assassination, Dutz was working for Sam Saia, a prominent New Orleans gambling figure who, per Aaron Kohn, was “very close to Carlos Marcello,” and
that
is how they try to connect Oswald (through Murret) with Marcello, who they claim was behind the assassination.
¹¹²

But there is no evidence that Murret was associated with Saia at any time near the assassination. Indeed, the only evidence on this point, from Murret’s wife, Lillian, suggests he wasn’t. In her deposition before the HSCA, the always candid Mrs. Murret testified that “in the thirties and forties” her husband worked for Sam Saia, a man she said was “in the gambling business,” at Saia’s club, the Lomalinda, in the French Quarter. When HSCA counsel asked her if her husband continued to work for Saia in the 1950s and 1960s, she replied, “Maybe he did.”

“Up until his death?”

“Oh, no. He was working on the riverfront when he died.”

“Are you pretty sure that Dutz was not involved in any gambling activities during 1963?”

“I am sure he was not,” Mrs. Murret answered. “He worked pretty hard up there on the riverfront.” And she made it very clear that when her husband did work for Saia he did not work at the riverfront at the same time (i.e., the riverfront being the day job and the gambling business at night and/or over weekends).

“Did he have both jobs at the same time?” HSCA counsel asked.

“No,” Mrs. Murret answered without equivocation, clearly adding that he went to work at the riverfront
after
he quit the gambling business. So when Mrs. Murret testified that her husband had been working at the riverfront (checking boxcars coming in for the T. Smith and Company steamship line) “for quite a few years,” that means that, if true, Murret would have long been out of his association with Saia or with gambling and other gamblers around the time of the assassination.
¹¹³
And, as indicated, that’s bad for the conspiracy theorists.

The 1978 testimony of Dutz Murret’s son, Eugene, before the HSCA was even worse for the conspiracy theorists, since it was a little more precise. Eugene Murret, a lawyer working as the judicial administrator of the Supreme Court of Louisiana at the time of his testimony, was very clear that although his father had been a bookie for years, at some point “
before
1959,” his father “was a self-employed bookie.” When asked if he worked before 1959 for Sam Saia, he answered, “Well, that would have been
way back
, I think,” the implication being before the 1950s. He said his father “mainly ran his own operation most of the time and maybe with one or two other people as time went along,” adding that although his father at some point in time worked with Saia, whenever he worked with anyone else it was usually with a man named Larry Rue, not Saia. He said his father’s bookie operation “was solely and exclusively to support his family and that is about what it made,” and believed he quit bookmaking around 1959 or slightly earlier because “business might have been bad, it might have been off” and “not producing the kind of income he needed to support his family,” suggesting his father wanted a job that “was eight hours a day and steady income.”
¹¹⁴

But let’s assume, for the sake of argument, that Murret, unbeknownst to Lillian or his family, kept his hand in the gambling business during the last years of his life by working evenings and weekends. It is certainly highly improbable that he’d be able to do this without their knowledge, but it’s possible. It’s also very unlikely that if he was moonlighting as a bookie, he would try to conceal it from his family since, in his family, it was never something to hide, his son Eugene even telling the HSCA that in high school he used to visit his father at his bookie establishments. It’s also possible that Mrs. Murret and Eugene lied under oath, though it is unclear why they would do this when they readily admitted Dutz worked as a gambler at one time. It really was nothing to be that ashamed of in New Orleans. As Mrs. Murret said, “Gambling at that time was wide open,” though it is not clear whether it remained that way in later years. Murret was apparently never perceived as a “real criminal” when he was involved in the gambling business, law enforcement apparently looking the other way at such activity in those years, one indication of which is that Murret doesn’t appear to have had any criminal record. Indeed, Lillian referred to him as being “very square,” and at the time in the summer of 1963 when Oswald was arrested for his confrontation on the streets and needed bail money, Dutz was away at Manresa, a “Catholic retreat house” where he went more than once a year.
¹¹⁵

But again, to please the conspiracy theorists, and without any evidence to support it, let’s assume that Dutz Murret was working with Sam Saia around the time of the assassination at Saia’s Lomalinda club, where gambling activity took place, and Saia was connected to Marcello. So what? Marcello, of course, had gambling and other enterprises throughout the Gulf States region, so Dutz working for someone who in turn was close to Marcello is of no consequence. And the HSCA learned that bookmakers throughout the New Orleans area subscribed, for a fee, to a Marcello-controlled wire service, which enabled them to get race results.
¹¹⁶
However, the HSCA was unable to find any evidence that Murret knew or even met Marcello, his only known connection being that he worked for Saia at one time, who apparently would have been paying Marcello for the use of the latter’s wire service.
¹¹⁷

But if we were to believe the conspiracy theorists, Murret worked for Marcello himself. One example among many: In his book
Contract on America
, author David E. Scheim writes that Murret was “associated with Marcello’s criminal organization.” Well, “associated” implies a lot more than merely working for someone who subscribes to Marcello’s wire service, even if we were to assume for the sake of argument that Murret himself, not Saia, paid the subscriber’s fee. Elsewhere, Scheim writes that Murret was a “criminal operative in the empire” of Marcello and “Murret worked as a bookie in Marcello’s criminal organization.” In other words, without any evidence to support his assertion, Scheim says that Murret worked not for himself or even Saia, but directly for Marcello.
¹¹⁸
Emile Bruneau, himself a gambler and a close friend of Murret’s for years, didn’t hesitate to tell authorities that Murret worked for Saia at one time and “assumed,” without knowing, that he knew New Orleans crime figure Nofio Pecora. But he said that though he couldn’t be sure, “I don’t think” Murret knew Marcello.
¹¹⁹
And Murret’s wife, Lillian, told the HSCA that although her husband probably knew of Marcello (who didn’t?) she was “sure he didn’t know him personally.”
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But even if we make the further assumption that Marcello wanted to kill Kennedy, and Murret worked directly for Marcello, isn’t there still a big piece of the puzzle missing? Why does Marcello get in touch with Oswald, of all people, to kill Kennedy for him? I mean, did he interview all the many underlings in his “empire” to find out if any of them, or anyone they knew, was willing to kill Kennedy for him, and one of his many interviewees, Murret, suggested his nephew Oswald (thereby now bringing Murret in as yet another co-conspirator in the assassination of Kennedy)? This is the line of reasoning of former HSCA chief counsel Robert Blakey in his book
The Plot to Kill the President
:

We [he has to be referring to his coauthor here, not the HSCA, which did not subscribe to any of what follows] considered it unlikely that [Oswald] would have bragged openly, least of all to his own relatives, of having tried to assassinate [General] Walker, but Marina knew, and she
might not have been
so loath to tell about it. [No evidence has ever surfaced that Marina told anyone back then about Oswald’s attempt on Walker’s life. All of the evidence is that she told absolutely no one, and only acknowledged it when Oswald’s letter of instructions to her, written before his attempt on Walker’s life, surfaced in the cookbook after the assassination.] She had, after all, confided to Ruth Paine about the beatings she got from Oswald. [As if telling someone with whom you are living that your husband had beaten you is the same as telling your husband’s aunt and uncle that he tried to murder someone.] We, therefore, believed it was
quite possible
that the Murrets learned of the Walker incident, and Dutz Murret was in an ideal position to connect his nephew with organized crime, since he himself was an underworld figure. We did not have reason to believe that Murret was a co-conspirator in the assassination, but we did regard him a likely conduit of information about Oswald—his conduct, his political beliefs, his violent bent (specifically, the assault on Walker)—to people who had the motive and the capability to plot the assassination.
¹²¹

So
maybe
Marina told the Murrets about Oswald trying to kill Walker, and
maybe
Dutz Murret told people close to Marcello about it, and
maybe
Marcello decided Oswald was his man. And
maybe
if I had wings I could fly. It’s okay to ruminate and daydream, but to use these reveries as the basis for the conclusion that Marcello had Oswald kill Kennedy is astonishing, particularly when there is no evidence at all that Marcello had anyone, much less Oswald, kill Kennedy. One would not expect such reasoning from someone of the considerable intelligence and stature of Blakey, who currently is a professor of law at Notre Dame Law School. Blakey continues to surprise when he concedes that “other than Murret, we were unable to identify [any] underworld associates of Oswald, though we
theorized
they would have been unlikely to be seen with him in public.”
¹²²
And based only on Oswald’s being a nephew of Murret, Blakey concludes that Oswald killed Kennedy for the mob?

I find it remarkable that Blakey, who is a leading authority on organized crime, actually believes that the mob would decide to kill Kennedy. Remarkable in the sense that, unlike virtually all students of the mob, he apparently, at least with respect to the Kennedy assassination, has very little respect for the mob’s intelligence and pragmatism. I mean, for the Mafia to murder Kennedy they’d have to be crazy. And for them to get Oswald, of all people, to do it for them, they’d have to be, in a legal sense,
not guilty by reason of insanity
.

Blakey’s position is additionally remarkable because other than the fourth-bullet conspiracy conclusion of the HSCA, which he embraces, Blakey demonstrated much common sense and competence as chief counsel for the committee.
*

Y
ears after all their deaths, Carlos Marcello, Santo Trafficante, and Jimmy Hoffa were accused of having Kennedy murdered by the late Frank Ragano, a mob attorney who represented not only Trafficante but also Hoffa when he was president of the largest union in the country, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. Since trial lawyers, as Ragano was, live in a world of lies, either by their client or by their opposition, one would think Ragano would be capable of a better lie than the one he told in his 1994 book,
Mob Lawyer.

Many who have implicated themselves or others in the assassination either are within the grasp of, or flirting very heavily with, psychosis, or have such a passion for the notion of a conspiracy that they’re willing to believe virtually anything. We’ve already seen both of these types on these pages. But Ragano, being a completely rational person who obviously just made up his story for his own self-aggrandizing reasons (to be discussed later), clearly doesn’t fit into either category.

If we’re to believe Ragano, around 2:30 p.m. on July 23, 1963, in the executive dining room of the Marble Palace Hotel in Washington, D.C. (so far, Ragano is not too bad—the details smack of the truth, right?), Hoffa, under constant investigation and indictment at the hands of RFK’s Justice Department (the most recent incident being his indictment the previous month, along with seven associates, for looting $25 million from the Teamsters pension fund), said to him, “Something has to be done. The time has come for your friend [Trafficante] and Carlos [Marcello, Trafficante’s close mob friend] to get rid of him, kill that son-of-a-bitch John Kennedy.”
*
The theory, Ragano carefully explains to his readers, is that Hoffa felt that Kennedy’s successor, LBJ, hated Robert Kennedy so much he’d never keep him on as attorney general, and LBJ wouldn’t pursue Hoffa because Hoffa had made large cash contributions to LBJ’s political campaigns. “This has got to be done,” he quotes Hoffa as telling him. “Be sure to tell them what I said. No more fucking around. We’re running out of time—something has to be done.”
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†