The Cosa Nostra Boss in New Orleans was a man called Carlos Marcello. He was involved in the rackets from an early age, was well respected and happily did business with mobsters all over America. Marcello also, curiously, liked to sub-contract various criminal activities out to others.
One of Marcello’s party tricks, undertaken on dozens of occasions over the decades, was to find a young thug back in Sicily with no family and raised in an orphanage. They would be offered a chance to come to America – ‘Don Carlos will arrange your visa and work permit’ – and once in America they would be asked to undertake a small favour in return. This could be (for example) to go to such and such an address and shoot the person there. Once that was done they themselves would be killed. As they were an orphan, nobody ever missed them: it was as if they never existed. These Sicilians were known as Zips, due to the fact they spoke very quickly.
In 1960 JFK gets elected US President. His brother Robert is made Attorney-General and immediately launches a major crackdown on ‘organised crime’. One of the actions was to have Carlos Marcello basically kidnapped on the street by FBI agents, flown to Guatemala and dumped there – on the grounds he had no papers and wasn’t even supposed to be in the US. Marcello traipsed around a village in the Guatemalan jungle looking for a telephone, eventually found one and called his lawyer. One thing led to another. This highly illegal action was reversed by a Federal Judge who ordered Marcello be allowed to return to the US unimpeded where his immigration status could be dealt with in the usual fashion.
Marcello vowed revenge and many of his friends agreed. There was just one teeny weeny problem – Cosa Nostra rules meant it was forbidden to kill law enforcement officers, prosecutors, jurors or judges. His fellow bosses made it clear to Marcello this rule must never, ever, be broken and the Attorney-General most certainly fell into the category of a protected species. OK, so you can’t kill the Attorney-General, but what about...the President? As that possibility had never crossed anybody’s mind, there wasn’t an official ban on such an undertaking.
Enter a colorful mobster called Johnny Roselli. He had been involved in various rackets in Los Angeles, Vegas and Cuba since the 1920s. He and Marcello knew each other well and had done a lot of business together over the years. It was Roselli who ‘found’ Oswald, the half-witted fall guy and Roselli helped Marcello find the other gunman who was almost certainly a Zip. Roselli also knew Jack Ruby from waaaaaaaay back yonder in Chicago.
The rest is history. On 22 November 1963, Oswald shot at JFK, hitting him, and the Zip delivered the kill shot. Roselli was the fellow in the parking lot behind the grassy knoll. In the confusion, the Zip calmly walked to Roselli’s car, was driven around the corner and probably murdered immediately. Ruby took care of Oswald a couple of days later.
The assassination of JFK was no more complicated than this. The reason nothing particularly credible ever surfaces is because those involved were all dead soon afterwards themselves and the Zip would have been an orphan with nobody missing him.
In 1976 when the US Congress re-opened the JFK investigation, Johnny Roselli was summoned to appear before the committee, but his body turned up in an oil drum floating in Miami harbor.
