JFK Assassination Plus General Discussion & Debate > JFK Assassination Plus General Discussion And Debate

Everything you never wanted to know about the Klein's Postal Money Order

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Michael T. Griffith:
I hate to break up this thread's exercise in mutual admiration and automatic agreement, but here's part of the rest of the story:

-- Oswald was at work when the money order was purchased.

-- The FBI was never able to verify that Oswald picked up the rifle from the post office. No postal worker recalled giving Oswald the package. Plus, there was no evidence that an "A. Hidell" was on the list of persons authorized to pick up mail from that post office box.

-- When the post office box form was entered into evidence, it was conveniently missing the part of the form that listed authorized recipients, even though postal regulations required that this portion of the form be retained for two years. However, the FBI, in a buried memo, admitted it knew that the form did not list an "A. Hidell" as an authorized recipient.

-- The alleged murder rifle was not the rifle that was ordered from Klein's. The 36-inch, 5.5 pound Mannlicher-Carcano carbine allegedly ordered by Oswald does not match the murder weapon entered into evidence by the Dallas police, which was a 40.2 inch, 7.5 pound Mannlicher-Carcano rifle.

-- The First National Bank of Chicago's unstamped deposit slip for the $13,827.98 deposit, which allegedly included the money order for the rifle, shows a deposit date of February 15, 1963--one month before the postal money order was purchased in Dallas.

When the Secret Service asked Klein's VP William Waldman about the $13,827.98 deposit, Waldman admitted that the bank had listed the deposit date as 2/15/63, but Waldman claimed the bank must have made a mistake on the deposit date, although Waldman added that he had no way of proving it was the wrong date. Really? No way of proving when a $13K deposit was made?! If the $13K deposit had been made on 3/15/63, instead of the date shown on the deposit slip (2/15/63), then Waldman merely needed to produce the Klein's bank statement for the month of March 1963. But he did not.

-- The $21.45 money order that Oswald allegedly mailed from Dallas to buy the rifle supposedly arrived at Klein's Sporting Goods on March 13, less than 24 hours after it was mailed, an amazing feat for the Post Office in 1963. We are also asked to believe that the money order was then deposited in the First National Bank on March 13, the same day it arrived at Klein's, a remarkably rapid processing of a money order, never mind that the deposit slip said the money was deposited on February 15.

Some sources for further reading:

https://harveyandlee.net/Mail_Order_Rifle/Mail_Order_Rifle.html

https://share.google/AeDdzmbMZXfnUAdUh

https://www.kennedysandking.com/john-f-kennedy-articles/a-presumption-of-innocence-lee-harvey-oswald-part-1

Lance Payette:
Just for fun, I reviewed some of the old Ed Forum threads on these issues. Good God, what a mishmash of uninformed blather and irrelevant tangents. In my first contribution, I – who had no idea what I was talking about – contributed a court case referring to “bank stamps.” I – who had no idea what I was talking about – was warmly welcomed by Sandy!

The case will illustrate what I said on my first post on this thread. It’s United States v. Cambridge Trust Co., 300 F.2d 76 (1st Cir. 1962). Stay with me here.

A guy named Porter purchased 699 PMOs payable to himself. He then cleverly raised the dollar amounts on all of them. A bank called Cambridge Trust Company paid the PMOs and was eventually reimbursed by the Treasury Department. The case is about the Treasury Department wanting its money back from Cambridge Trust.

Here is what I did not grasp at the time: Cambridge Trust was “a Massachusetts state-chartered trust company.” It was not a member of the Federal Reserve System.

As described in my first post here, a state-chartered bank like Cambridge Trust got its PMOs into the Federal Reserve System through its designated clearinghouse bank, here the First National Bank of Boston. First National did not pay Cambridge Trust but simply transmitted the PMOs to the regional Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. There was no need for First National to bank stamp (endorse) the PMOs because it was simply performing a middleman function.

Precisely as described in my first post here, Cambridge Trust did indeed bank stamp the PMOs. That stamp read: “Pay to the Order of Any Bank, Banker or Trust Co. Prior Endorsements Guaranteed Cambridge Trust Company.”

Because I was clueless at the time, I failed to realize the significance of Cambridge Trust being a state-chartered bank and First National being its clearinghouse bank. What occurred was precisely what I described in my first post here.

The Klein’s PMO issue is hereby declared as dead as a vampire with a stake through his heart. I will hear or say no more about it. All honors previously bestowed on the late Sandy, RIP, in connection with this matter are hereby revoked. If the Harvey & Lee loons persist with this nonsense, they are lying frauds.

Which reminds me: Here is the very first factoid I ever busted!

On the recommendation of Walt Brown, I actually bought Harvey & Lee. $80 at the time. It came to me directly from Armstrong in Hawaii. A footnote in the PMO discussion referred to a statement by Robert Wilmouth, Vice President of the First National Bank of Chicago, to the effect that the Klein’s PMO should have bank stamps on the back.

Diligent me checked the footnote. Wilmouth said absolutely, positively NOTHING OF THE KIND. And neither did anyone else. You can read Wilmouth’s statement here: https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=10408#relPageId=199.
This was so blatant that the H&L site was quietly corrected. But all the other bank stamp nonsense remains.

Wilmouth did say that the Klein’s PMO would have gone from the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago to “a central processing center in Kansas City, Missouri.” Neither Little Old Me nor anyone else in the silly debate understood that this was the Postal Service’s auditing center, where PMOs did indeed go before being placed into storage at the federal records center in Alexandria. Lester Gohr of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago clarified that there were actually two auditing centers, Kansas City and Washington, DC: https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=10408#relPageId=200.

And that’s all I’m going to say about that. Factoid busting is hard, detailed work. When dealing with CTers, you can’t just say “The File Locator Number settles it.” You have to approach the matter as though you were trying to kill a vampire, because you pretty much are.

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