A thought exercise: A Mafia conspiracy is established beyond any doubt ...

[Michael T. Griffith]

Here's a thought exercise for you:

-- JFK, through his brother RFK, was threatening the very existence of several powerful Mafia organizations, especially those of Marcello and Giancana.

-- JFK allowed RFK to humiliate Carlos Marcello by (arguably illegally) deporting him without due process and leaving him stranded in Guatemala.

-- Thus, certain Mafia leaders had powerful motives for wanting JFK dead: revenge and survival.

-- Some Mafia leaders were overheard talking about killing JFK before the assassination.

-- A credible informant reported that Marcello admitted being involved in JFK's death.

In contrast,

-- Oswald had no known motive for killing JFK, and he adamantly denied killing JFK at every opportunity while in police custody.

-- By all accounts, Oswald admired and thought highly of JFK.

-- According to the lone-gunman theory, Oswald tried to kill General Edwin Walker, a fanatical right-winger. It boggles the mind to imagine why someone who wanted General Walker dead would feel any desire to kill JFK, given that JFK had criticized and publicly humiliated Walker, and given that Walker had accused JFK of being a traitor.

[Tom Graves]

Oswald had no known motive for killing JFK.

Dear Comrade Griffith,

Lee Harvey Oswald was a psychologically disturbed self-described Marxist, and he would have killed JFK "to advance The Dialectic" or because he wasn't gettin' any from Marina, or both.

-- Tom

[Steve M. Galbraith]

From "Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald?", PBS Frontline special:

NARRATOR : At a party in February 1963, Oswald was introduced to oil geologist Volkmar Schmidt. The two hunkered down by a window to talk politics.

VOLKMAR SCHMIDT : Lee Harvey Oswald brought up in the conversation with me the fact that he really felt very angry about the support which the Kennedy administration gave to the Bay of Pigs invasion. It turned out that Lee Harvey Oswald really idealized socialism of Cuba, while he was critical of the socialism in the Soviet Union. And he was just obsessed with his anger towards Kennedy.

NARRATOR : Schmidt says he tried to divert Lee's political anger toward a more worthy target. General Edwin Walker was a virulent anti-communist. He had recently been fired by Kennedy for preaching right-wing extremism to his troops.

Mr. SCHMIDT : I mentioned General Walker, who deserved criticism because he was a racist retired general, ultra-right-wing, and who had just a few -- a little time before talked to students at the University of Mississippi who then got so agitated that they shot and killed some reporters.

https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/oswald/etc/script.html
 

[Steve M. Galbraith]

Why would a pro-Castro fanatic, a devoted Marxist, want to kill an anti-communist President who was waging a not so covert war on Cuba?

In any case, we have this from Jack Childs' account of his meeting with Castro shortly after the assassination:

[Tom Graves]

From Jack Childs' account of his meeting with Castro shortly after the assassination:

That's what Castro allegedly told Morris and/or Jack Childs (J. Edgar Hoover's beloved but probably Kremlin-loyal SOLO).

But why would Oswald go to the Cuban Embassy?

He wanted a transit visa to Havana.

You go to a consulate for a visa, not an embassy.

[Lance Payette]

Here's a thought exercise for you:

-- JFK, through his brother RFK, was threatening the very existence of several powerful Mafia organizations, especially those of Marcello and Giancana.

-- JFK allowed RFK to humiliate Carlos Marcello by (arguably illegally) deporting him without due process and leaving him stranded in Guatemala.

-- Thus, certain Mafia leaders had powerful motives for wanting JFK dead: revenge and survival.

-- Some Mafia leaders were overheard talking about killing JFK before the assassination.

-- A credible informant reported that Marcello admitted being involved in JFK's death.

In contrast,

-- Oswald had no known motive for killing JFK, and he adamantly denied killing JFK at every opportunity while in police custody.

-- By all accounts, Oswald admired and thought highly of JFK.

-- According to the lone-gunman theory, Oswald tried to kill General Edwin Walker, a fanatical right-winger. It boggles the mind to imagine why someone who wanted General Walker dead would feel any desire to kill JFK, given that JFK had criticized and publicly humiliated Walker, and given that Walker had accused JFK of being a traitor.

Well, no thread stays on track for more than four posts on any forum, so I suppose this was inevitable. My point was not to launch a discussion of the Mafia scenario. I just chose it as a "What if?" example.

You're not telling me anything I don't know, which is why I find the Marcello scenario the most plausible CT scenario. The Mafia, which had assisted Joe Kennedy in the election of JFK, felt betrayed by RFK's zeal for organized-crime busting. Not what they had anticipated. Marcello was personally humiliated by RFK. Those things in themselves are sufficient motive for what would have been a routine hit, notwithstanding that the target was the POTUS. While I don't think LBJ was quite the fiend he is often portrayed as being, surely he would have been expected to be far more Mafia-friendly. If we then add the bonus of the possibility of a made-to-order pro-Castro patsy triggering an invasion of Cuba, thereby opening the door to the restoration of the Mafia's lucrative Cuban empire - well, it's perfect, almost too good not to be true. Marcello would not have needed or wanted the CIA, DPD or any such nonsense. This would have been a tight, closed operation, absolutely a routine hit with zero risk even if Oswald were caught and revealed all about the pro-Castro operation he thought he was involved in.

Probably this didn't happen - but it's the most plausible CT scenario by far. The elaborate scenarios where the Mafia is in cooperation with the CIA and whatnot, and all sorts of elaborate plans and cover-ups become necessary, are simply silly. Marcello would have laughed at any such scenario. (Yes, I know about the relationship between the CIA and Mafia, but Marcello would not have been this stupid when it came to offing the POTUS. A Marcello operation would have been tight and controlled with absolutely no fingerprints left behind and no need for anything resembling a cover-up. Idiot Oswald would have been the built-in cover-up.)

No motive on the part of Oswald? As long as he thought he was involved in a pro-Castro operation, he had a very strong motive. Gus Russo has, I believe, established how well-known in the Cuban community (both pro- and anti-Castro) JFK's and RFK's personal vendetta against Castro was and how imminent were their plans to rid themselves of him once and for all. Castro's own warning about assassination attempts was widely published just a couple of weeks before Oswald went to Mexico City. I always felt Oswald had sufficient motive (complex as it may have been) before reading Russo, but Russo's work has given me great confidence that Oswald had PLENTY of pro-Castro motive, either as a LN or as part of what he thought was a pro-Castro conspiracy. There is no way that on 11-22-63 Oswald still "thought highly" of JFK if he ever did.

Your Walker stuff goes nowhere. Oswald had strong civil rights sensibilities as well as Marxist ones, and Walker was an entirely plausible target when the shot was taken. JFK was an entirely plausible target for pro-Castro reasons when those shots were taken 7+ months later. JFK's and RFK's known anti-Castro plotting would have rendered JFK's actions against Walker completely irrelevant to Oswald. By 11-22-63, all Oswald cared about was Castro and Cuba.

[Lance Payette]

One additional aspect of the "perfect" Marcello conspiracy, now that I'm on a roll: There would have been absolutely no need for Oswald to be a "LN" patsy. He only had to be a "pro-Castro" patsy who thought he was involved in a pro-Castro operation. If he knew no more than that, he was harmless dead or alive. The LN stuff is the effort by LBJ et al. to avoid the obvious pro-Castro implications. Marcello et al. may have been laughing their fannies off at the efforts to explain Dealey Plaza in one-gunman terms. (The faux "pro-Castro" Mafia pro would have been in the Dal Tex or County Records building simply because any other location would have absurdly magnified the risks.) I'm starting to like this. If John Orr hadn't gone off on his goofy tangent of Oswald being a reluctant but knowing Marcello recruit, I might be an Orr-ite.