Forty-nine years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy former mob buster Robert Blakey contends the most likely explanation from the available evidence is that the Mafia was responsible as reported by Tovin Lapan for the Las Vegas Sun:
I think the mob set Oswald up as a patsy. It's not that I think (Oswald) didn't shoot (Kennedy), but that I think he was set up so (investigators) would focus on the Cuban connections (and not the mob). Did the mob do it? I don't know for sure, but it explains more of the evidence than anything else.
Blakey, currently a law professor at the Notre Dame Law School, is the author of The Plot To Kill The President which first set forth the case that the Mafia got away with assassinating Kennedy as reported by David Talbot for Salon:[Blakey] would emerge as the Warren Report's most authoritative critic and a firm believer that Kennedy had died as the result of a conspiracy, masterminded by [New Orleans Godfather Carlos] Marcello and his Mafia ally, Santo Trafficante, the Florida godfather who had been driven out of the lucrative Havana casino business by Castro and who had been recruited in the CIA plot to kill the Cuban leader.
Historians increasingly have embraced Blakey's analysis, and in 2008 Lamar Waldron and Thom Hartmann published Legacy of Secrecy in which they rather conclusively establish the mob's responsibility for the hit against the President.
Leonardo DiCaprio will star in and produce the film adaptation of Legacy of Secrecy in which "DiCaprio will play FBI informant Jack Van Laningham, who befriends the southern mafia leader, Carlos Marcello, a man the book fingers as the potential mastermind of the 1963 murder (he reportedly even confessed involvement)" as reported by Terri Schwartz for MTV.With regard to Marcello's confession to Laningham regarding the Kennedy assassination, in reviewing Legacy of Secrecy for the Herald Sun James Campbell wrote the following:
The strongest evidence the authors produce is Marcello's confession to an FBI informant in the 1980s. "The FBI had managed to get an informant inside Marcello's cell and Marcello trusted this guy," Waldron said. According to a 1985 memo quoted in the book, the informant told the FBI: "On December 15, 1985, he (the informant) was in the company of Carlos Marcello and another inmate at the Federal Correctional Institute, Texarkana, Texas, engaged in conversation. Carlos Marcello discussed his intense dislike of former President John Kennedy as he often did. Unlike other such tirades against Kennedy, however, on this occasion Carlos Marcello said, referring to President Kennedy, 'Yeah, I had the son of bitch killed. I'm glad I did it. I'm sorry I couldn't have done it myself.'"
Anytime some mob apologist delusionally waxes romantic about how patriotic the Mafia is, just remember that the boys likely were the ones who whacked the President. Now how patriotic was that?
