"Ultimate Sacrifice": An excerpt

In a blockbuster story unrevealed until now, the mob tried to kill Kennedy just days before he was gunned down in Dallas.

By Lamar Waldron with Thom Hartmann

Dec 1, 2005 | Author's introduction

"Ultimate Sacrifice" reveals for the first time in any book that JFK was the target of an assassination plot during his long motorcade in Tampa, Florida, on November 18, 1963, four days before Dallas. The Tampa plot -- and its many parallels to Dallas -- has remained hidden because of the battles John and Robert Kennedy were waging against Fidel Castro and the Mafia in 1963. The Kennedys had a top-secret "Plan for a Coup in Cuba" designed to overthrow Castro on December 1, 1963, and JFK's activities on November 18, 1963, were part of that plan. Hours after JFK's Tampa motorcade, the president was scheduled to give a major speech on Cuba in Miami, intended to assure the coup leader in Cuba of JFK's support. Several lines in JFK's speech had been provided by the CIA, whose code-name for their supporting role in the coup plan was "AMWORLD," a name only recently declassified.

The Kennedys pursued their coup plan because Castro had not allowed the UN inspections for weapons of mass destruction that were part of JFK's agreement with Russian leader Khrushchev to end the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Kennedys had attempted secret negotiations with Castro in the fall of 1963, but those were not producing results. So, working with Cuban exiles close to Robert Kennedy such as Enrique "Harry" Ruiz-Williams and Manuel Artime, the Kennedys continued their plans for a coup, which we call "C-Day" for convenience.

In 1963, C-Day (AMWORLD) was different and far more advanced than any previously-disclosed coup plan (AMTRUNK) or the CIA's own Castro assassination operations that had not been authorized by the Kennedys. Those included a plot with mid-level Cuban official Rolando Cubela (AMLASH) run by CIA officials Richard Helms and Desmond FitzGerald. Other unauthorized CIA Castro assassination plots in the fall of 1963 included the CIA-Mafia plots with mobster Johnny Rosselli, who worked closely with David Morales, Chief of Operations at the CIA's huge Miami station.

In the days and weeks before Dallas, Robert Kennedy had a committee making contingency plans for dealing with the possible "assassination of American officials" if Castro uncovered the coup plan and decided to retaliate. However, the real danger was from the Mafia bosses Attorney General Robert Kennedy was prosecuting in the largest war against organized crime America had ever seen. Tampa godfather Santo Trafficante, Carlos Marcello -- godfather of Louisiana and east Texas (including Dallas) -- and Johnny Rosselli's Chicago Mafia family were specific targets. As Marcello told an associate, he intended to end Robert Kennedy's crusade against them by killing JFK. These three Mafia bosses infiltrated and compromised the Kennedys' C-Day coup plan, as part of their plot to kill JFK. They realized linking JFK's death to C-Day/AMWORLD would eliminate any chance of a truly thorough investigation, because of national security concerns.

The Tampa plot would be the second Mafia attempt to assassinate JFK in November 1963; the first had taken place in Chicago on November 2, 1963. JFK had cancelled his Chicago motorcade and trip at the last moment, after a serious threat emerged which had been kept secret at the time. The gunmen were not apprehended, but an unusual ex-Marine named Thomas Vallee -- who had several parallels to Lee Harvey Oswald -- was briefly detained. "Ultimate Sacrifice" also details the role of Chicago law enforcement official Richard Cain, a "made" member of the Mafia and associate of Rosselli, whom CIA documents confirm had learned about C-Day. Shortly after the Chicago threat, a Miami police informant obtained information about an upcoming attempt on JFK from far-right extremist Joseph Milteer, whom the book links to a man working for Carlos Marcello. The attempt on JFK in Trafficante's Tampa was apparently meant to be blamed on a young man named Gilbert Policarpo Lopez, whom the book notes had more than a dozen parallels to Oswald in 1963. Among them were links to the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, being a former defector, a tie to Russia, getting into a fight over seeming pro-Castro sympathies, and an unusual trip to Mexico City. Lopez would be secretly investigated by the FBI, CIA, and Warren Commission staff after JFK's assassination, though the book makes it clear he was only a patsy.

-- Lamar Waldron

Chapter 56: November 18, 1963: The attempt to assassinate JFK in Tampa

By late Sunday, November 17, or early Monday, November 18, 1963, the Secret Service was extremely concerned that an attempt would be made to assassinate JFK during his motorcade in Tampa, Florida. This threat, detailed here for the first time, has not appeared in any previous book. Information about the threat was confirmed by Tampa's police chief at the time, J. P. Mullins; by a high Florida law-enforcement official involved in security for JFK's motorcade; and by Secret Service agents such as Abraham Bolden. Secret Service documents about the Tampa attempt were destroyed "in an apparent violation of the JFK Act" in 1995, according to the JFK Assassinations Records Review Board. (1) We had first informed the Board of the Tampa attempt just a few weeks earlier, after finding what appear to be the only two articles about it which briefly surfaced in two Florida newspapers in the days after JFK's death (no articles about the threat appeared while JFK was still alive). One small article appeared in the Tampa Tribune on November 23, and part of that article was excerpted in a small article in the Miami Herald on November 24. However, by that time "the FBI, Secret Service, and local officers declined to discuss the matter," and no further articles appeared in either paper.(2)

This plot to kill JFK was different from the minor threats reported against JFK in Tampa in May 1963 and October 1963 (the latter involving a businessman named John Warrington, who had nothing to do with the serious threat). (3) The Tampa threat was not revealed to the Warren Commission or any of the later government committees that investigated aspects of JFK's assassination, until we brought it to the attention of the Review Board in 1995. The House Select Committee on Assassinations had a few documents which in retrospect did concern the serious Tampa threat, but since the HSCA had not been officially informed of that threat, they apparently assumed that those documents only applied to the Joseph Milteer threat.

One of the two surviving small articles mentions "a memo from the White House Secret Service dated Nov. 8 [that] reported: 'Subject made statement of a plan to assassinate the President in October 1963. Subject stated he will use a gun ... Subject is described as white, male, 20, slender build, etc.'" That memo -- cited in a November 23, 1963, article in the Tampa Tribune -- may no longer exist in Secret Service files. The suspect's description in the memo matches either Gilberto Lopez (described by the FBI "23, 5 7, 125 lbs. ... fair complexion") or Lee Harvey Oswald far better than the initial description that would be issued in Dallas four days later, after JFK was shot, which put out a lookout for a thirty-five-year-old man. The article also quoted Mullins as saying that there were two people involved in the threat, and "he did not know if the other two may have followed" JFK "to Dallas." (4) Just as in Chicago, there were two suspects on the loose prior to a JFK motorcade -- only this time, on this day, there could be no cancellation if JFK were going to convey a convincing image of strength to the C-Day coup leader in Cuba.

More information about the threat comes from Secret Service files that still existed in the late 1970s. Some of those found by a Congressional investigator "made it clear that the threat on Nov. 18, 1963 was posed by a mobile, unidentified rifleman shooting from a window in a tall building with a high power rifle fitted with a scope." There are two highly unusual things about the information in that Secret Service memo. First is how closely the timing and wording in that memo matches a long-secret internal CIA memo from November 19, 1963, in which Desmond FitzGerald "approved telling [Rolando] Cubela he would be given ... high powered rifles w/scopes" in a weapons cache. As noted earlier, providing those weapons would have been the job of David Morales, who was also in position to know about the plot of Rosselli and the other mob bosses to kill JFK. One can only imagine the reaction of FitzGerald and Helms if JFK had been killed in Tampa by the type of weapon they were going to provide to Cubela -- or how they felt when they heard how JFK had been shot in Dallas with a "high powered rifle" with a scope, at the very moment their agent was meeting with Cubela in Paris.

Second, even when one of the Secret Service agents who wrote the memos was shown a copy, Congressional investigators say he "experienced difficulty in recalling detailed information of any kind" and had "virtually complete loss of memory," saying he "had 'no recall' of these facts even when his own recollection was refreshed by his own memoranda." (5) Just like the Chicago attempt, information about Tampa would be covered by an intense veil of official secrecy. Secret Service agent deFreese was willing to admit to Congressional investigators that "a threat did surface in connection with" JFK's Florida trip and "there was an active threat against the President of which the Secret Service was aware in November 1963 in the period immediately prior to JFK's trip to Miami made by 'a group of people.'" However, he focused only on the Miami part of JFK's trip, not on Tampa. (6) In the 1990s, the Secret Service agent who drove the car immediately behind JFK in Tampa (and Dallas), Sam Kinney, told researcher Vince Palamara that the threat that day had "something to do with organized crime" and "one of the unions." (7) Santo Trafficante controlled organized crime in Tampa and most of south Florida, and, as we know now, Teamster head Jimmy Hoffa was backing Trafficante's plot to kill JFK.

In his first interview about the subject since 1963, former Tampa Police Chief J.P. Mullins confirmed the existence of the plot to us in 1996. He indicated that it wasn't a far-right threat that was based on the Milteer information, which he didn't recall having been shared with the Tampa police. Chief Mullins also said that they had not been told about the recent Chicago plot to kill JFK. However, when given the full names of the two men linked to Gilberto Lopez whose last names were Rodriguez and Gonzales, Mullins thought they sounded familiar, but he couldn't say for sure. He recalled that no suspects were arrested that day, but said that if a suspect wasn't taken "into custody on some legal pretext, they'd keep them under surveillance," echoing what happened to Vallee and the other suspects in Chicago. He said that since "they were worried about the guy who fit the description in the newspaper" article, it was more likely that suspects "were kept under surveillance." He said that "the Secret Service gave us names to watch for, and our own Intelligence Unit had names to watch for," but Oswald's name "wasn't on any [watch] list."(8)

Mullins described Trafficante as "their main mobster," and he said that in general they "tried to keep the heat and surveillance on him," which eventually caused Trafficante to spend more time in Miami, away from Tampa. Mullins was familiar with Trafficante's attorney, Frank Ragano. Mullins had become police chief again just weeks before JFK's motorcade, after having been replaced for a time by Chief Neil Brown, whose Senate testimony from September 1963 we cited earlier. Mullins had a good reputation for being honest and against the Mafia. He had been acting chief in 1958 and full chief in 1960, before being dropped back to number two under a new mayor. When the mayor changed again, Mullins became chief again. However, local politics would cause back-and-forth changes in the Tampa Police Department's leadership that would eventually lead to the files about the Tampa threat being destroyed. Under Mullins, the Tampa PD had "huge files on Trafficante" (with a code like "CI-60," because they began in 1960), and files on the Tampa JFK attempt. But eventually, another official told us that a new Tampa mayor and his new police chief had those files "destroyed ... so they couldn't be subpoenaed" by any of the JFK investigating committees.(9)

Regarding the Tampa motorcade, Mullins said a "Secret Service agent told him it was the President's longest exposure in the US -- the only one longer was in Berlin." JFK's motorcade was scheduled to go from MacDill Air Force Base to Al Lopez Field, then to downtown Tampa and the National Guard Armory, then to the International Inn, and finally back to MacDill. According to an article about the motorcade, "the Tampa police alone supplied 200 of the department's approximately 270 uniformed force." In addition, "four hundred men from federal law enforcement agencies such as the US Air Force also saw duty," including "law enforcement officers from the state, six counties, and the cities of St. Petersburg and Clearwater." (10) With a total of six hundred trained professionals guarding JFK, it's clear how serious the security concerns were.

One of those other officials also spoke to us about the Tampa threat. Chief Mullins was eighty-two when we spoke to him, but he was still alert, and he recalled the key points of that historic day. But he felt that this other individual might remember more, since he was several years younger than Mullins, and he suggested that we talk to him. Mullins vouched for this official's honesty and integrity, which we were able to confirm, along with the official's position in 1963. The official was active in the fight against the Mafia in Florida, so he would prefer to remain anonymous. This high Florida law-enforcement official was "convinced there was going to be a hit in Tampa" against JFK on November 18, 1963.

Like Mullins, the Florida official said that he and his agency hadn't been told about the Chicago attempt. The official recalled that one of the three places that especially concerned the Secret Service was a bridge, though he didn't understand why at the time. Once we informed him that Chicago newsmen had told a former Senate investigator that the Chicago plot involved a "planned assassination attempt from one of the overpasses," the official said he finally understood the Secret Service's concern about the bridge. (11) The other two places the Secret Service was concerned about were "a place where gangsters hung out" and the Floridian Hotel (sometimes referred to as the Grand Floridian).

Next Page: JFK knew he was in mortal danger

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