The Jimmy Hoffa-JFK assassination connection

According to Frank Sheeran, Jimmy Hoffa was considered loveable by Sheeran’s daughters, while the girls steered a wide berth around the Sicilians. After Hoffa’s disappearance, the daughters suspected their father’s involvement in the killing and broke off contact. The film does a masterful job exploring the family dynamics and I find it strange some suggest it’s too long and should have ended with the hit, and not spent so much effort on the collapse of the assassin’s family. Those critics are missing the point.

But the film does fail to explore the crucial Hoffa-JFK assassination connection even though it does have a cameo of David Ferry, the CIA operative who worked for Carlos Marcello’s lawyer. And the film does indicate JFK was passing notes to Sam Giancana through a mutual mistress, but fails to mention Momo’s hit man John Roselli fired the first shot at JFK, hitting him in the throat.

Sheeran was introduced to Hoffa as a house painter (hit man) who did carpentry (disposed of bodies), but there was nothing in the film about Hoffa ordering any hits even though Sheeran would have been the logical choice to carry one out. Maybe that info was left out intentionally by Sheeran, or maybe Hoffa did have a sense of karmic consequences.

Had Sheeran refused to kill Hoffa, he felt sure he would have been whacked for turning down the mission, and it was clear Hoffa’s fate was sealed in any event. So no need for both of them to die. That was his logic.

The Kennedy brothers may have changed after the mantle of power was placed on John. Or maybe it was the LSD Mary Meyer gave them both that turned them into peaceniks. Their father was part of the Irish mob, as opposed to the Jewish or Sicilian, but in reality, all mobs are capable of doing business or going to war. Hoffa became the primary target of a Kennedy war. But later, after JFK was killed, he provoked the ire of the CIA.

Joe McCarthy and Roy Cohn launch the fictitious Red Scare.

Bobby got his political teeth cut under the tutelage of Roy Cohn, chief investigator for Senator Joe McCarthy, who launched the fictitious Red Scare. It’s interesting the Communist movement in America was spearheaded by John Reed, who turned out to be an intelligence agent, although that realization (first uncovered by Antony Sutton) has not yet penetrated very far. For the most part, the American Communist Party was run by CIA counterintelligence under James Angleton, who also occupied the crucial Israeli-Vatican seat. While shaking down and setting-up Reds, Cohn also defended major organized crime figures in New York.

The first Congressional attempt to infiltrate organized crime was the Kefauver hearings, which explored the Sicilian brotherhood. It was a conspiracy theory at the time that the Sicilians had a national organization, something only taken seriously by the public for decades. Eventually Congress became compelled to investigate the rumors and that turned into the OJ trial of its day as the hearings were shown on live television. RFK did many withering Cohn-style interrogations that mocked the elderly godfathers, creating the impression for some RFK was a spoiled brat.

Congress failed miserably to penetrate the secret society because nobody talked beyond taking the Fifth, although a few Democrats did jail time after it was uncovered they’d taken “loans” from suspected crime bosses. The Teamster connection with the Sicilians was probed, and Dave Beck, head of the Teamsters, was forced out for taking a similar $300,000 interest free loan, and that’s how Jimmy Hoffa took over the Teamsters.

A decade later, the Valachi hearings finally proved the existence of a national Sicilian commission, while the heads of the five families in New York were identified. But a month later, JFK was assassinated by a CIA/mob hit squad, and RFK was soon just another lawyer. And Hoffa mysteriously disappeared shortly after bribing his way out of jail.

Apparently, the CIA and crime bosses had been working together for years, and while Hoover’s FBI had remained focussed on rooting out commies while denying the existence of any organized crime, the CIA was running the commies while the Sicilians were collecting photos of Hoover getting blowjobs. But since Hoover was also taking bribes and cooperating, there was no need for the CIA or the Sicilians to ever use those photos.

These matters were made more complex when Jimmy Hoffa switched parties, refusing to back JFK for president. Since Hoffa was influential and urging brother Teamsters to also vote for Nixon, and since the Teamsters were the biggest union in the country, this was a serious concern. The Democratic party had already been stung by negative perceptions post Kefauver. Hoffa was viewed as one of Kennedy’s biggest obstacles in capturing reelection. That and the challenge of winning the state of Texas, home to Big Oil and John Birchers, two elements joined at the hip that were revolting against JFK’s pivot toward world peace.

Hoffa may have even worked with RFK on removing Beck through exposing that unpaid loan. But Hoffa broke longstanding Teamster tradition by supporting a Republican. So when RFK became Attorney General, he immediately initiated a campaign to destroy Hoffa. At one point around 50 grand juries were investigating every aspect of Hoffa’s life, and it drove Hoffa crazy.

Hoffa was the most popular and powerful labor leader in the country, and made sure his union got the most favorable contracts, and he delivered the best pension plan. That billion dollar pension fund was also the cookie jar deployed to transform Las Vegas into the greatest gambling center in America. The Sicilians never needed any banks when they had the Teamster Pension Fund at their disposal.

Hoffa shared the same lawyer as Carlos Marcello and Santos Trafficante, the senior leaders of the Southern wing of the Sicilian men-of-honor society. Upon hearing the news of JFK’s death, Hoffa cheered. Soon, however, he was in jail due to efforts he took to protect himself against those grand juries, having been convicted of jury tampering.

Walter Sheridan

The head of RFK’s “get Hoffa squad” was Walter Sheridan. Hoffa viewed RFK as a spoiled Ivy League trust funder and his pissing war with Kennedy had only resulted in Hoffa’s incarceration.

While Hoffa was in jail, Jim Garrison launched an investigation into the JFK assassination, prodded by Hale Boggs, the Warren Commission member from New Orleans, and sole dissenter of the single bullet theory. “There’s no way one man shot up Jack Kennedy that way,” said Boggs before disappearing in a mysterious airplane crash.

Garrison was being viciously ridiculed in the national media, and the spearhead on the attack was none other than Walter Sheridan, who was now a producer for NBC. While others attempted to divert the spotlight upon Marcello and Trafficante, Garrison remained convinced only the CIA and Pentagon had the capabilities to control key elements in the plot and coverup. Because of Roselli’s involvement, Giancana had to be consulted in advance.

Hoffa was quoted something along the lines of: “Garrison is a smart man. Anybody who thinks he’s a kook is a kook themself.”

If Hoffa had been involved in the assassination, it’s unlikely he would have supported Garrison. Hoffa was not a mobster, but a labor leader who understood the reality of life on the street where everyone plays dirty when they can get away with it.

Playing dirty in those days involved bullets, bombs and illegal wiretaps. The government was doing it, the mobsters were doing it, and Hoffa had the best wiretapper in the business doing it, and he collected some tapes documenting both Kennedy brother’s sexual affairs, including one with Marilyn Monroe. But Hoffa never used those tapes against them.

It’s certainly possible that by speaking out in support of Garrison, Hoffa excited the players inside the Sicilian-CIA connection to action since they both had serious concerns the hit might someday unravel. So when Russell Bufalino explains to Sheeran that “the big boys” have decided Hoffa’s fate, Sheeran responds Hoffa is a big boy.

“Not that big,” replies Bufalino.

The Torture Report

Remember this guy? A year-and-a-half after 9/11, Pakistan ISI picked up Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and turned him over to the CIA, who renditioned him to Gitmo and proceeded to torture him for years, while also waterboarding him 183 times, “enhanced interrogation techniques” designed to break down his personality. Two weeks after Khalid was picked up, we invaded Iraq and destroyed the social fabric of that country, a campaign that resulted in nearly a half million casualties.

Gitmo torture would have been illegal on US soil, and “confessions” extracted under such duress have no more credibility than those extracted by Jesuit inquisitors during their crackdown on the Renaissance. So what is it about 9/11 that resulted in this two-decade delay in prosecuting the case, which is now scheduled to go before a military tribunal in 2021?

It’s amazing two psychologists with zero experience in interrogations or terrorism were paid $81 million dollars to administer torture to the Gitmo detainees, at least a quarter of whom were completely innocent and never should have been abducted and tortured in the first place. After the reality of what was going on leaked out to Congress, audio and video tapes of all torture sessions were swiftly destroyed by the CIA.

The Report is a film about the decade-long investigation conducted by Daniel Jones, a Senate staffer for Dianne Feinstein, vice chair of the Intelligence Committee. Jones was given access to millions of CIA documents and emails and spent seven years tracking every detainee through the system, discovering some painful truths along the way. Unfortunately, his report was suppressed and never made public.

But his conclusions are presented in this film, and they include that the CIA knew the torture sessions would not produce credible evidence, only fake confessions. Why would the CIA pay $81 million dollars to conduct worthless interrogations? Even more startling, the film exposes the lies of Zero Dark Thirty, a blatant propaganda film that attempted to justify Gitmo torture as essential to the capture and assassination of Osama Bin Laden, who was probably already long dead anyway.

But the film really stops short of examining the bigger questions, like who really planned 9/11, and who really was murdered in Pakistan?

So the reason the CIA snatched 775 people and tortured them for years was not to get to the real story of 9/11, but to create the false impression they had actually rounded up the perpetrators , while extracting confessions that could be touted in the media to justify the war on terror.

The film is certainly worth watching on Amazon, even though it does drag on while skirting around some obvious truths. Maybe if more Americans start putting two and two together, the scales may fall from their eyes. I know it’s difficult for many to confront the reality international terrorism is a tool of intelligence agencies and deployed to justify a fascist military state that inflicts the terror through secret operations.

The truth is the Gitmo torture sessions laid a foundation for a future wave of jihadist terrorism, because that’s exactly what’s going to happen. When you foment violence (especially upon innocent people), eventually that violence will come back at you in some form. In intelligence, it’s called “blowback,” and the CIA is well aware of the impact and implications.

Boardwalk Empire sucks

I had high hopes for Boardwalk Empire when the show first arrived, but got alarmed after I realized there was zero attempt to maintain historical accuracy. After the shark jumped ten times, I lost all passion for the show.

If they had only told the real story of Nucky Johnson and his epic feud with William Randolph Hearst, but I guess that was too close to the real oligarchy. Nucky was not rubbed-out on the boardwalk, but jailed for tax evasion, the same fate that brought down his buddy Al Capone. After four years in jail, he returned to a much downsized Atlantic City, which had been crushed by the 1929 stock market crash. Although production qualities and acting remained peerless on this show, the script was mostly concerned with creative staging of moments of extreme violence. But meaningless violence is on the rise everywhere these days.

I was especially annoyed how they transformed Harlem numbers king Casper Holstein (left) into a completely heartless dope peddler. In fact, Holstein was the genius who figured out how to engineer a gambling racket based off the daily stock market tally and was a great supporter of charities and known as the black Andrew Carnegie.

Boardwalk Empire pretended to tell the story of the birth of organized crime, but they distorted the story beyond recognition. Lucky Luciano is mostly known as the first gangster who made a deal with an intelligence agency. He did not invent the concept of a Sicilian “Commission of Peace.” According to Joseph Bonanno, who was there at the beginning with Luciano, the idea of this commission predated Bonanno’s arrival in the United States (1908). National conventions had been held infrequently over the decades and the network was not uncovered by law enforcement until the 1950s, but the concept had been floated after a war broke out between two Italian families in New Orleans over rights to unload banana boats owned by Italian shipping lines, resulting in a lot of bad publicity and crackdowns against Italian-Americans nationally.