Gaeton fonzi biography of william hill

Well, he said, it was because the President was waving his arm, and then, trying to illustrate why the jacket would ride up, Specter pulled my arm high over my head - far higher than the Zapruder film showed Kennedy waving his hand. If you take this point right here and then you strip the coat down, it comes out at a lower point. If the entrance holes were at a lower point than the exit hole, how could Oswald have shot Kennedy from the sixth floor window of the Book Depository?

In the end, Specter admitted they had what he described as - quote - "some problems with that. My interviews also revealed that the Commission had "some problems" with other troublesome evidence, including the so-called "pristine" bullet, the angle of Governor Connally's wounds, the timing of the shots. I'll never forget the numbing disbelief I came away with after my interviews with Specter.

Vince Salandria was right, the Warren Report was wrong, there had to have been a conspiracy. We were young once and not so brave. We wanted to cling to the myth of a mystery. We wanted to hang onto the questions of motivation and parade the usual suspects and the illusion of a dilemma before the American people. Could the Mob have killed President Kennedy?

Could Castro have killed President Kennedy? Could anti-Castro Cubans have killed President Kennedy? I suggest to you that if it ever becomes known what specific individuals comprised the apparatus that killed Kennedy, those individuals will have some association with any or all of the above. And still the emergence of such individuals, dead or alive, will add but inconsequential detail to the truth about the assassination.

Because we have known -- and have long known - who killed President Kennedy.

Gaeton fonzi biography of william hill

Could any but a totally controlling force - a power elite within the United States Government itself - call it what you will, the military-intelligence complex, the national security state, the corporate-warfare establishment - could any but the most powerful elite controlling the U. Government have been able to manipulate individuals and events before the assassination and then bring such a broad spectrum of internal forces to first cover up the crime and then control the institutions within our society to keep the assassination of President Kennedy a false mystery for 35 years?

Is there any doubt that the Warren Commission deliberately set out not to tell the American people the truth? There is a brief glimpse, an illustration of the level at which that deceit was carried out, in an incident that occurred during the Warren Commission's investigation. Crafard had worked at Jack Ruby's Carousel Club before he was seized by FBI men as he was hightailing it out of town the day after the assassination, having told someone, "They are not going to pin this on me!

The next question that Warren immediately asked was: "What kind of entertainment did they have at the club? Veciana was introduced by name to Phillips twice, once in the banquet hall and once in the hallway. Phillips even asked that it be repeated and then, when Veciana asked him, "Don't you remember my name? It was odd because anti-Castro activity was the heart and soul of Phillips' mission during the period in question.

It was impossible for Phillips not to know or remember Veciana's name. Phillips had simply been caught off-guard by Veciana's surprise appearance at Reston and had a little "slip of tradecraft. I urged Chief Counsel Bob Blakey to recommend Phillips be charged with perjury, since we had three witnesses to that Reston encounter: myself, Veciana and an aide from Senator Schweiker's office.

Blakey declined to take on the CIA. One demolishes the single-bullet theory: the locations of the bullet holes in the back of Kennedy's jacket and shirt - hard, tangible, measurable evidence - obliterate the possibility of a bullet emerging from Kennedy's throat and striking Governor Connally. Single-bullet-theory author Arlen Specter conceded this was a worrisome contradiction.

The other substantiation came from validating Sylvia Odio's report that Oswald, or someone who resembled him it matters not , appeared at her door in Dallas with two associates, one of whom would link Oswald to the notion of killing the President. That was a deliberate act of connecting Oswald to the assassination before the assassination.

Beyond all the other evidence indicating conspiracy, all the acoustic tests, the autopsy evidence, the bullet trajectory theories and what have you, even beyond all the other evidence of Oswald's associations, the Odio incident absolutely cries conspiracy. In fact, I have no hesitation in declaring the Kennedy assassination a conspiracy based strictly on Sylvia Odio's consistently credible testimony and, more important, the fact that our investigation proved it true.

To obtain more details about those meetings, I suggested we talk to Walton. The next morning, a Saturday, Carbajal called him and Walton agreed to drive down from his home in Scottsdale to meet the three of us at the Holiday Inn. Walton is in his mid-fifties, a pleasant, ruddy-faced fellow with Irish good looks and an easy, straightforward manner.

He remembers their first trip to Washington as being in the spring of When you're from a dry climate like Arizona and you go back there in the summer you're just sweating like a pig. But I don't remember being uncomfortable, so I think it was early in the spring of Walton corroborates the reason for the trip and the meeting with Morales: "We felt, or at least Rocky felt, that he could give us an inside track on who were the people who were for real and who were not.

That was a big concern of mine because I had already been on one wild goose chase, spent an expensive week in Nassau waiting for a transaction to close and it never did. Their evening with Morales, Walton remembers, was both very pleasant and, in more than one way, especially memorable. It was Rocky and his wife, me and my wife and Rocky's mother and father.

Morales, not someone who trusted strangers or even associates easily, obviously was impressed by Walton's character and, although their commodities business never took hold, he later called on Walton to represent him on a few matters back in Phoenix. It was something Morales said at one of those subsequent encounters in Phoenix that makes Walton put what had happened in Washington in a very special perspective.

It's a remote area, I've only driven that road once in my life. It's an agricultural area, they grow the famous jalapenos peppers there. I never got to see the house, but he had just finished it and was describing it to me when he mentioned that he put in it the best security system in the United States. And I remember asking him, thinking he was worried about burglars or being robbed, 'What do you need so much security for?

You're still thirty miles from the Mexican border. Remembering that now, Walton views his first meeting with Morales in Washington as being far more significant than he realized. After dinner, the whole party went back to the Dupont Plaza Hotel. It was late and Carbajal's parents and his wife returned to their rooms and Ruben and Morales returned to the Waltons' room with them.

The drinking got heavy. It was a real contest. Morales began with his war stories. Walton remembers him talking about the killing in Vietnam and Laos, about being involved in the capture of Che Guevara in Bolivia, of hits in Paraguay and Uruguay and Venezuela. They almost bought the farm on that one. The drinking and the talking continued.

At one point, Morales began probing Walton for a bit of his own background. Walton had gone to Amherst College in Massachusetts and, as part of his developing interest in political science and politics, he had done some volunteer work for Jack Kennedy's Senatorial campaign. Walton never got to explain the details of that association. At the first mention of Kennedy's name, he recalls, Morales literally almost hit the ceiling.

Walton says Morales's tirade about Kennedy, fueled by righteous anger and high-proof booze, went on for minutes while he stomped around the room. Suddenly he stopped, sat back down on the bed and remained silent for a moment. Then, as if saying it only to himself, he added:. I looked at Ruben Carbajal, who had remained silent while Walton was telling me this.

Carbajal looked at me and nodded his head. Yes, he was there, it was true. But, in all the long hours we had spent together and all the candid revelations he had provided, it was a remembrance he couldn't bring himself to tell me about his friend Didi. While reporting on CIA assassination plots abroad, both the Church Committee and the separate inquiry chaired by Nelson Rockefeller, had declined to look at the King and Kennedy assassinations of the previous decade.

But two members of the Church committee. They hired one researcher, Gaeton Fonzi, a journalist who had been interested in the case since the s. Fonzi became the first person employed by the US federal government to investigate the Kennedy assassination under the assumption there was a conspiracy. But the subcommittee had limited time and limited budget and just when Fonzi found an apparently important lead, the sub-committee was wound up.

The chair of the main committee, Frank Church, 'was chomping at the bit, anxious to get into the Presidential sweepstakes,' and wanted his committee's report published. Q: How do you view Posner's technique on this subject vs. For example, it does not appear from the notes in the back of his book that he interviewed her, relying instead on her testimony to the WC, yet, he doesn't hesitate to mention her emotional problems, her divorceor that there isn't one piece of corroborating evidence for her post-assassination claim that one of the men who visited her was introduced as 'Leon Oswald'.

Could he have interviewed her? Should he have interviewed her? He considered it impossible that the C. Robert Blakey, the chief counsel and staff director of the House committee, now a professor at the University of Notre Dame Law School. The white whale for Mr. Fonzi was the meaning of those supposed contacts. Blakey was criticized by Mr. Fonzi as overly deferential to the C.

Fonzi was probably right on that score. Blakey said he was shocked in when declassified C. The agency never told Mr. Blakey that the agent, George Joannides, had overseen a group of anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Dallas in the months before the assassination, when Oswald had two well-publicized clashes with them. At the time of the revelation, the C.

Joannides had withheld nothing relevant from the committee. Among Fonzi's contacts was Alpha 66 leader Antonio Veciana, who told Fonzi that he had seen his mysterious handler, code-named "Maurice Bishop", in the company of one Lee Harvey Oswald in the late summer of The search for Bishop led to David Phillips, whose name is no longer unfamiliar to Kennedy assassination researchers and whose career within the Agency is now much better understood.

Despite Veciana's failure to, or refusal to, identify Phillips as Bishop, Fonzi became convinced that indeed this CIA propaganda expert who rose to become Chief of the Western Hemisphere Division had had a relationship with Oswald and played a sinister role in creating the "legend" of Oswald as a Communist sympathizer. His HSCA colleague Dan Hardway, co-author of the Lopez Report , had found connections to Phillips among several of the people who had been instrumental in the stories that cemented that image of Oswald.

Fonzi reports in his book that at one point Hardway told him: "I'm firmly convinced now that he [Phillips] ran the red-herring, disinformation aspects of the plot. The thing that got him so nervous was when I started mentioning all the anti-Castro Cubans who were in reports filed with the FBI for the Warren Commission and every one of them had a tie I could trace back to him.

That's what got him very upset. He knew the whole thing could unravel. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikidata item. Investigative journalist and JFK assassination researcher. Background [ edit ]. Career [ edit ]. Publications [ edit ].