For more than six long decades the questions have been the same.
Was President John F. Kennedy murdered by the mob or by the FBI, the CIA and anti-Communist Cuban exiles, perhaps in league with right-wing paramilitaries?
All these groups and more besides have been blamed over time for helping commit, or at least allow, one of the most consequential murders in American history.
It is all the more frustrating, then, that the 80,000 ‘new’ Kennedy papers released by the National Archives have done so little to untangle the rat’s nest of claim, counterclaim and cover-up that still obscures the truth.
Yet it’s worth remembering that many of the key answers stare us in the face, as I explain in my new book, Borgata: Clash of Titans: A history of the American mafia.
A little-known man named David William Ferrie not only pulls the threads of this complex plot to kill Kennedy together but was, I believe, the mastermind who conceived and sprang the deadly trap at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, on November 22, 1963.
A predatory oddball with a taste for underage boys, Ferrie combined the volcanic rage and bizarre appearance of a true Bond villain.
Instantly recognizable – and completely hairless thanks to alopecia – Ferrie wore a distinctive home-made, red mohair wig which he stuck to his scalp with glue. It looked like a stray cat’s bed.
Was John F Kennedy murdered by the mob or by the FBI, the CIA and anti-Communist Cuban exiles, perhaps in league with right-wing paramilitaries? (JFK, his wife Jackie, Texas Governor John Connally and his wife Nellie smile at the crowds in Dallas on November 22, 1963.)
David William Ferrie (pictured) not only pulls the threads of this complex plot to kill Kennedy together but was, I believe, the mastermind who conceived and sprang the deadly trap at Dealey Plaza, Dallas, on November 22, 1963.
The 80,000 ‘new’ Kennedy papers released by the National Archives have done so little to untangle the rat’s nest of claim, counterclaim and cover-up that obscures the truth. (Pictured: JFK and Jackie greeting crowds at Love Field airport on the day of his assassination).
A pair of beady eyes peered out from behind false eyelashes while, above, he sported thick and uneven ‘eyebrows’ daubed in greasepaint.
Almost nothing about Ferrie could be described as normal. As a young man, he tried to become a Catholic priest but was thrown out of the seminary for ‘erratic personal behavior’.
Besides philosophy and religion, he studied Latin and Greek and developed interests in psychology, medicine, chemistry, hypnosis and the occult.
At one point, Ferrie ran a cancer research program in his small, book-filled apartment in New Orleans, where hundreds of mice scurried round in cages.
A woman who worked with Ferrie said that tumors had been implanted in the rodents and that the CIA had shown interest in the results.
In 1951, Ferrie became a pilot for the now defunct Eastern Air Lines, eventually flying covert missions delivering weapons to Cuba for the CIA, which was fighting (and failing) to prevent Fidel Castro seizing power.
Later, in the run up to the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961 – a doomed attempt to overthrow the communists – Ferrie flew CIA-backed bombing raids over Cuba.
With extensive experience of firearms, Ferrie helped set up a military training camp outside New Orleans for Cuban exiles who referred to him as the ‘master of intrigue’.
But after President Kennedy withdrew his support for the operation – and abandoned the CIA-backed Cuban Brigade on the beaches – Ferrie felt personally betrayed.
According to the FBI, Ferrie began stating openly that Kennedy ‘ought to be shot’.
In 1961, Eastern Airlines decided to fire Ferrie after he was arrested for having sex with minors. A legal bid to fight the sacking failed, yet the case opened new doors for Ferrie, including one which took him straight to the Mafia.
His attorney, G Wray Gill, was so impressed with the investigative skills Ferrie demonstrated during the case that he hired the disgraced pilot to work in his office.
Once there, Ferrie was assigned to help with Gill’s most prominent client, the New Orleans Mafia don, Carlos Marcello.
Marcello was another man who loathed Jack Kennedy and his younger brother Bobby, who was then Attorney General.
Like other mob chiefs, the enraged Marcello was desperate to stop Bobby’s unprecedented war on organized crime – and was on record as saying the president must die.
Marcello had sworn to ‘cut the head off the dog to stop the tail from wagging’. Which is to say he would kill Jack Kennedy to silence the troublesome Attorney General.
Bobby was going after Marcello personally, in fact, and had instigated a Federal fraud case against him – the case that Ferrie was now helping to defend.
Indeed, the Kennedy brothers had no shortage of enemies, including influential people within the FBI.
Bobby despised the cross-dressing Bureau director, J Edgar Hoover, for example, and wanted him sacked. It hardly helped that Hoover persisted in the ludicrous claim that Marcello, one of the most dangerous hoods in the US, was no more than a simple tomato salesman.
Ferrie had FBI connections, too. When he was not working with G Wray Gill, he was hanging around the office of man called Guy Banister who had spent 20 years as a special agent for the Bureau.
Banister belonged to the Right-wing militia group, the Minutemen and was a firm believer in the domino theory positing that, if one Latin American country became Communist, the rest would soon follow.
Banister founded a private detective agency near the New Orleans waterfront where, among other things, he ran background checks on Cubans who wished to join a band of CIA-backed anti-Castro militants.
Another figure often seen with Ferrie inside Banister’s office was Lee Harvey Oswald, the only man ever to be arrested for the Kennedy shooting – before he was himself gunned down on live TV by nightclub owner and Mafia thug Jack Ruby.
Oswald and Ferrie had first met several years earlier in 1954 when 15-year-old Oswald joined the New Orleans Civil Air Patrol. One of the captains and pilots at the time was Ferrie and they were photographed together.
While we know little about their relationship at the time, it is a fact that the middle-aged Ferrie was a sexual predator, psychologically aware and skilled at hypnosis while Oswald had an erratic, fatherless and apparently vulnerable background.
The Kennedy brothers had no shortage of enemies, including influential people within the FBI. (Pictured: John F. Kennedy with brothers Robert and Edward).
Carlos Marcello (pictured) was another man who loathed Jack Kennedy and his younger brother Bobby, who was then Attorney General.
Lee Harvey Oswald (pictured in his mugshot) and Ferrie had first met several years earlier in 1954 when 15-year-old Oswald joined the New Orleans Civil Air Patrol.
Ferrie appears to have been close to Jack Ruby, also. Patrons, strippers and employees of Ruby’s Carousel Club in New Orleans later said that Oswald and Ferrie had frequented the Carousel in the weeks before the Kennedy assassination.
Ferrie, then, had the motive, the know-how and the connections for killing Kennedy. His movements around that time, too, were highly suspicious.
Ferrie had regular meetings with Louisiana don Marcello in the summer and fall of 1963, for example.
Marcello has long been described as a key mafia influence in Kennedy’s assassination, along with Florida don Santo Trafficante and Chicago boss Sam Giancana.
In September 1963, two months before the killing, Ferrie’s meetings with Marcello became more frequent.
On November 5, it was confirmed that the president’s visit to Dallas would take place on November 22. The motorcade would wind its way through Dealey Plaza, passing beneath the Texas School Book Depository building where Oswald, after a brief job-hunting expedition, began working on November 16.
Given Marcello’s anaconda-like grip on the state of Texas, including its police and politicians, he must have been thrilled when he heard that Kennedy – the man he wanted dead – was traveling to his patch.
The weekend of November 9 and 10 found Ferrie shacked up with Marcello at the gangster’s swampy Churchill Farms estate in Louisiana.
They were back there again for the whole of the following weekend, too, on November 16 and 17.
It’s true that Ferrie was part of Marcello’s legal team defending the federal fraud charges. But did they also discuss the horror scheduled to unfold at Dealey Plaza on Friday November 22?
If Ferrie’s movements in the weeks leading up to the shooting seemed unusual, his reaction in the aftermath was quite extraordinary.
Ferrie seemed concerned, in fact, not by the murder of the 35th president but by the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald and promptly flew into a panic.
While we know little about their relationship at the time, it is a fact that the middle-aged Ferrie (pictured) was a sexual predator, psychologically aware and skilled at hypnosis while Oswald had an erratic, fatherless and apparently vulnerable background.
This might be an understandable reaction if, as I believe, the original plan had been to silence Oswald – the only gunman ever identified and an obvious patsy – by killing him straight after the assassination.
Yet Oswald – a member of Ferrie’s inner circle – had now been picked up in a movie theatre. He was very much alive and apparently minded to talk.
Given time, the authorities could easily have traced a line from Oswald back to Marcello via Ferrie himself – who had just spent two weekends with him in a row.
At about 9pm, Ferrie and two companions piled into a 1961 blue Comet station wagon and drove 350 miles non-stop from New Orleans to Houston through a thunderstorm, pulling into the Alamotel’s parking lot at approximately 4am on Saturday morning. The Alamotel was owned by Carlos Marcello.
Later that Saturday, according to an FBI report, Ferrie made a collect call to Marcello at the Town and Country Motel in New Orleans.
Ferrie then traveled to a skating rink in Houston where he used the public telephone to make and receive calls throughout the afternoon.
Only when Oswald was shot dead by Ruby on November 24 did Ferrie think it safe to return to New Orleans, where – as a person of interest – he turned himself in to the authorities.
Ferrie said little under questioning from the FBI, who then released him with surprising speed.
In 1964, the official Warren Commission concluded that Kennedy had been killed by Oswald, who had acted entirely alone. But New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison was not convinced. And by the start of 1967, Garrison had commenced his own investigation into Ferrie and his involvement.
Ferrie’s reaction was telling. Speaking to an investigator at Garrison’s office, he said: ‘You know what this news does to me, don’t you? I’m a dead man. From here on, believe me, I’m a dead man.’
So it proved. In February 1967, the nude, hairless body of 49-year-old Ferrie was found lying on his living room couch.
His apartment was littered with newspaper clippings, magazine articles and diagrams relating to the JFK assassination.
There were also two type-written suicide notes, although neither provided clues about the murder of the President.
Papers found in Ferrie’s apartment revealed him to be the owner of an automotive service station that Marcello had purchased for him in early 1964.
It is understandable that Marcello should reward Ferrie for his legal services but it is harder to explain why their business relationship continued after Marcello’s acquittal on the fraud charges (Marcello had bribed a juror) or what such a large gift could have been for.
Ferrie’s cause of death was said to be a ruptured blood vessel in the brain. But the honesty of the autopsy has been questioned and no one has explained why, not long before his body was found, Ferrie had been left entirely alone by the men who were supposed to be guarding him round the clock.
Finally, there are the words of Ferrie himself, revealed at the trial of New Orleans businessman Clay Shaw who, on March 1967, was charged by Garrison with conspiring to kill Kennedy in concert with Oswald and Ferrie (by then both dead).
In 1964, the official Warren Commission concluded that Kennedy had been killed by Oswald, who had acted entirely alone. (Pictured: JFK slumps down in the back seat of the Presidential limousine).
Only when Oswald was shot dead by Ruby on November 24 (pictured) did Ferrie think it safe to return to New Orleans, where – as a person of interest – he turned himself in to the authorities.
Shaw was found not guilty. But the court heard from a 25-year-old partygoer called Perry Russo who testified that Shaw, Oswald and a number of Cuban militants had listened as Ferrie explained how to kill Kennedy.
Ferrie’s plan had been to assassinate the president and then blame it on Castro which, he believed, would lead an outraged US to invade Cuba.
Oswald – the only man ever blamed for the Kennedy shooting – was supposedly infatuated with communism and might plausibly have been smeared. There is also evidence that, in the weeks before the assassination, Ferrie had tried to frame Oswald as a Castro sympathizer.
According to the witness at the party, Ferrie claimed he had proposed a ‘triangulation of crossfire’ which would place Kennedy in the crosshairs of three separate snipers.
This testimony was entirely consistent with a hand-drawn map of the Kennedy killing that the police found in Oswald’s room following his arrest.
The truth matters, due process matters and that’s why we must continue to demand that the CIA and the FBI finally unredact and release the evidence they have concealed for all these years.
Yet some things are disarmingly simple all the same. From Capitol Hill right down to the Louisiana bayous, many influential people had wanted Jack Kennedy dead and his brother Bobby silenced.
I believe that David William Ferrie was the man that made it happen.
Borgata, Clash of Titans, the second part of Louis Ferrante’s History of The American Mafia is published by Pegasus in the US, price $29.95, and Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK, price £25.
