The "mysterious death" of Hale Boggs, anyone?

[Lance Payette]

Oh, Lord, this is endless … this is my absolute last gasp … well, at least I'm showing you clucks the amount of effort required to expose one of your beloved factoids ...

1. Whatever one thinks of Harvey & Lee, John Armstrong did a staggering amount of research. The John Armstrong Collection at Baylor University is the most user-friendly collection I’ve ever encountered. In 1994, Armstrong and co-author Craig Roberts published a book called JFK: The Dead Witnesses. Boggs is included, so I thought I’d search the Armstrong Collection.

No luck. I searched all boxes relating to The Dead Witnesses and did global searches for “Boggs” and the “Los Angeles Star."

There was precisely one hit: In the short part on Boggs, The Dead Witnesses repeats the Star factoid, failing to note that the “startling revelations” language was (supposedly) that of a Boggs aide rather than Boggs himself.

To their credit, the authors say “IF THIS WERE TRUE …” it would suggest a motive for Boggs’ death. If this were true, indeed.

2. A possible breakthrough here: I found another reference to the Los Angeles Star! In Coup D’Etat in America the authors refer to “misinformation” propagated by Richard Sprague “in his article in the Los Angeles Star” concerning the famed Three Tramps.

That’s it, folks, so who cares?

Ah, but who was Richard E. Sprague? But, of course – he was a close associate of Bernard Fensterwald! He is described in those very terms in Coup D’Etat in America,. Indeed, he was the co-founder with Fensterwald of the Committee to Investigate Assassinations and was likewise involved in the Garrison circus as the team’s photographic expert.

His original estimate of the JFKA was four gunmen, six shots and 50 conspirators. With Fletcher Prouty, he later amended this to include zero shots from the TSBD and the planting of all evidence related to Oswald. Yes, he was nuts.

He is the author of The Taking of America, 1-2-3, which you can read for free courtesy of my friends and colleagues at the CIA: https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/11/1183CF937B8095F6A96DB7C9468BDE2A_The_Taking_of_America_-_Richard_Sprague.pdf.
 
You can read about him here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_E._Sprague and here: https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKspragueE.htm.

A Google search for “Sprague” and “Los Angeles Star” turns up nothing but the one reference from Coup D’Etat in America. Boggs is mentioned in The Taking of America, but neither of the dubious quotations is included and the Star is not mentioned.

"So how is this a breakthrough, Mr. Caped Factoid Buster person?" you ask.

A. Well, we see that the only other reference to the Star is in connection with a fellow CT whack job who was joined at the hip with Brother Bernie Fensterwald.

B. If Sprague was writing “articles” about the Three Tramps in the Star, it can scarcely have been anything resembling a mainstream newspaper.

C. Ergo and to wit: The Caped One strongly suspects that the Star was some Fensterwald/Sprague JFKA gossip sheet that is now being cited as though it were the Los Angeles Times.

As always, prove me wrong if you can.

[Lance Payette]

Yep, I've cracked the code at last!

It occurred to moi that "Los Angeles Star" might have been an attempt by Fensterwald, Sprague and other Conspiracy Loons to give Los Angeles Times-type dignity to some sleazy rag that was actually called the LA STAR.

BINGO!

Courtesy of eBay, presented for your edification is the cover of a 1974 issue of the LA Star, "An Unauthorized Newspaper" (whatever the hell that means). You can judge for yourself the seriousness of this erudite publication.

THIS, then, is where Fensterwald and Sprague published their work.

You cannot make this stuff up. Well, you can, I suppose - but only the LA Star would publish it.

[Lance Payette]

Oh, Jesus, it only gets better ...

Below is an issue from September of 1973. The seller describes the Star as "an underground, reader-written sleaze paper. Filled with b/w erotic photographs and drawings, personal erotic experiences, art, letters, a large personals and classifieds section, and news on politics and censorship. This issue features a nude, tied up, and chained Janis Joplin on the cover."

This is your Los Angeles Star, CT fans. Are those Hale Boggs quotes starting to look just a bit iffy?

Back issues are also available at my beloved Advanced Book Exchange, although I couldn't find the 11-22-63 edition.

[Lance Payette]

Lest the salient points in all of the above be lost, let's recapitulate and then I'll move on to greener fields ...

1. Boggs' plane most likely went down in October of 1972 as the result of a Mafia bombing that had nothing to do with Boggs but was focused on Congressman Begich and may have involved the knowing or unknowing participation of Boggs' wife, who married the confessed bomber 14 months later.

2. Alternatively, the plane may have gone down as the result of poor weather and a daredevil pilot; however, there are just too many Mafia connections for this to be the preferred explanation.

3. On the floor of Congress in April of 1971, Boggs did not say the things about Hoover that the CT literature reports him as saying; you can read the 1-minute speech for yourself.

4. What Boggs said about Hoover had already been said by other members of Congress; the only novelty of Boggs' speech was his call for AG Mitchell to demand Hoover's resignation (when Hoover was 75 and a year away from death).

5. Boggs' crash was five months after Hoover's death, at which time Nixon (a Boggs admirer) was President, Kleindienst was AG, Gray was Acting Director of the FBI, and the Watergate scandal was in full bloom.

6. The confessed Mafia bomber, years later and while in prison, floated the idea that Hoover had ordered Boggs killed; as noted above, Hoover had been dead five months at the time of the crash, and there is every reason to believe the bomber floated this as an (unsuccessful) negotiating tool in his then-ongoing negotiations with the FBI.

7. The Los Angeles Star of November 22, 1973, in which a quotation that is the foundation of the "Boggs as a JFKA mystery death" factoid supposedly appeared, did not exist. There had been no Los Angeles Star for almost 100 years.

8. A different publication, the LA Star, was the ultimate sleazy, sensationalist, sexually explicit rag that billed itself as "an unauthorized newspaper" and featured articles written by readers. It described itself as "journalism at its funnest."

9. Richard E. Sprague, a CT True Believer if there ever was one, had founded a company in the LA suburb of Hawthorne and wrote articles for the LA Star.

10. The November 22, 1973 edition of the Star (i.e., tenth anniversary of the JFKA) contained an article quoting an unnamed former Boggs aide to the effect that Boggs had "startling revelations" about the JFKA and Watergate shortly before his death.

11. The CT literature attributes the "startling revelations" quotation to Boggs, even though the piece in the LA Star attributed it to an unnamed former aide.

12. The "startling revelations" quotation first received wide attention in the 1977 "mysterious deaths" book Coincidence or Conspiracy? by Bernard Fensterwald; it has since been repeated, invariably as "reported in the Los Angeles Star," throughout the CT literature.

13. Fensterwald, a longtime radical and extreme CT True Believer, was virtually joined at the hip with Sprague, including their founding of the Committee to Investigate Assassinations and their participation in Garrison's investigation. One can be reasonably certain that Sprague and/or Fensterwald wrote the piece in the 11-22-73 edition of the Star.

14. Also appearing in Fensterwald's book is another quotation, likewise attributed to an unnamed former Boggs aide and almost surely originating in the same 11-22-73 piece in the Star, to the effect that “Hale always returned to one thing: Hoover lied his eyes out to the Commission – on Oswald, on Ruby, on their friends, the bullets, the gun, you name it."

15. The "lied his eyes out" quotation is almost always attributed to Boggs himself in the CT literature.

16. There is utterly no reason - no factual basis - for believing that Boggs was a "JFKA mystery death." He was skeptical of some aspects of the Warren Report, but this would scarcely have been a reason to blow up his plane eight years later (by which time CT books by Lane, Weisberg, Garrison and others had already been published).

17. Boggs' wife Lindy replaced him in Congress, served until 1991, and lived to be 97. She acted as the "unofficial ambassador to New Orleans" for the ARRB and authorized the ARRB's access to all of Boggs' papers at Tulane University.

18. None of the above will stop the CT community from declaring Boggs a JFKA mystery death, mischaracterizing his speech to Congress, attributing the bogus quotations to him, or claiming that said quotations were reported in the Los Angeles Star.

19. You're welcome. Please, hold your applause. Now back to masturbating over whether Baker took 83, 97 or 112 seconds to reach the lunchroom because that's really, really, really important and just might hold the key to the entire case. 

[Tim Nickerson]

Lance,

When you finally do tire of the JFK assassination discussion, please don't delete your account here. You did that on the ED forum and a lot of good info was lost.

[Lance Payette]

Lance,

When you finally do tire of the JFK assassination discussion, please don't delete your account here. You did that on the ED forum and a lot of good info was lost.

Yes, I wish I could recover some of it myself! I was fairly proud of my work on the HT LINGUAL program and the Raleigh phone call. I did only delete the posts from my most recent incarnation there. However, all the surviving ones are now shown as "Guest" posts. Since lots of other people who have departed are also shown as "Guest," mine are hell to find unless I remember exactly what I said and can search by the specific language, as with my "Beginner's Guide to the Conspiracy Game."

[Tim Nickerson]

Yes, I wish I could recover some of it myself! I was fairly proud of my work on the HT LINGUAL program and the Raleigh phone call. I did only delete the posts from my most recent incarnation there. However, all the surviving ones are now shown as "Guest" posts. Since lots of other people who have departed are also shown as "Guest," mine are hell to find unless I remember exactly what I said and can search by the specific language, as with my "Beginner's Guide to the Conspiracy Game."

I actually have some of what you posted in the ED Forum saved in a Doc file. Not much though.

[Lance Payette]

I actually have some of what you posted in the ED Forum saved in a Doc file. Not much though.

I've probably mentioned it before, but I lurked at the Ed Forum (as a CTer, mind you) for quite a while, AWED by how much these characters knew and feeling entirely unworthy. One day, the Klein's postal money order came up. I saw the numbers across the top and simply wondered "So what are those?" I could find no discussion of them at all. In about an hour, I discovered an article explaining the Treasury Department's then-new punch card system and that these numbers showed the money order had been processed through the Federal Reserve banking system and stored at the federal records center. Suddenly, I found myself being referred to - comically, it seemed to me - as a "JFK researcher." The fact that these numbers had apparently not been previously identified was kind of eye-opening to me about the status of JFKA "research."

It also seemed to me that my discovery pretty well killed any argument that the money order was bogus or lacking in the "bank stamps" it supposedly should have had. But NOOOOO ... Sandy Larsen just moved the goal posts and insisted the money order had been planted at the records center (but without the "bank stamps" that are the big red flags for CTers?). So now we were off to the races. I did extensive research as to how postal money orders worked and thought I had pretty well resolved the issue. But NOOOOO ... Lawyer Sandy (I think he was some sort of engineer) did his own legal research, which was completely flawed, and not only announced victory but declared it one of his greatest triumphs.

Suffice it to say, my previous AWE was long gone. I probably should have quit right there. I did realize, however, that busting CT factoids could be kind of fun in small doses. As Steve has pointed out, however, it's completely exhausting - I must have 15 hours in this Boggs nonsense alone - and entirely futile. In fact, when I joined here I was in the process of writing the DEFINITIVE expose of the money order silliness, tracing the evolution of the money order system back to the 1800s. Poor Sandy had simply worked himself into total confusion, as non-lawyers tend to do when faced with statutes and regulations. But that project became so absurdly long and time-consuming that I deleted it, too, and decided I'd let Sandy have his little victory.

Seldom have I had one as much fun as this Boggs stuff, I must say.