The Three Tramps

Thanks to Lee Bowers, an alert railroad employee with an unobstructed view of the parking lot next to Dealey Plaza during the JFK assassination, three men fleeing the scene and hiding in a boxcar in the train yards were picked up and escorted to the nearest police facility, where they were apparently released without being photographed or fingerprinted, an unexplained oversight that should have raised numerous red flags immediately. Bowers would later testify that he heard three shots, one coming from the grassy knoll and two from the mouth of the triple underpass. Bowers died a few years later, before public awareness of the three suspicious men emerged. The men are not mentioned anywhere in the Warren Commission Report, although seven pictures were taken of them by three different photographers. (Similarly, the 9/11 Commission ignored the bizarre collapse of Building 7.)

Anyone with knowledge of law enforcement procedures recognizes something is amiss with these policemen, who seem little interested in the men they are escorting, one of whom carries a large paper sack, and all of whom must be considered suspects in just having murdered the President of the United States. Although known today as “The Tramps,” they were clean-shaven, wore nice clothes and expensive shoes.

This shot clearly shows the three faces. Notice the woman in the background holds her hand over her mouth. Apparently, she believes JFK’s killers are being paraded before her, while one of them smiles with satisfaction. It is hard to imagine under what circumstances someone in custody would be allowed to carry a paper bag or why such important suspects would not be handcuffed as they were found hiding immediately after the assassination.

In the late sixties, Richard Sprague and Bernard Fensterwald formed the Committee to Investigate Assassinations (CITA). Sprague was a photographic buff who’d assembled the largest private collection of JFK photos and became attached to just about every investigation, from Garrison to Congress. One of his more bizarre theories was that a dart had been fired out of an umbrella, and that was the source of Kennedy’s neck wound and real cause of death.

In Illinois, where I grew up, the most brilliant conspiracy researcher was Sherman Skolnick, who’d brought down a federal judge in Chicago before becoming immersed and entangled in the JFK psyops. Although his research remains impeccable, Sherman had a bit of a blind eye on Mossad elements, tending to blame most drug trafficking on the Queen of England. In reality, presidents and heads of state are largely ceremonial and not typically involved in planning or executing the complex war plans, operations that begin with the beating of a psyop drum. Study all the characters who came out of the woodwork to collect and control information on the JFK assassination, because most of them turn out to be spooks, and in hindsight Sherman appears to be one of the few that wasn’t.

CITA held their conference on the anniversary of the JFK assassination in 1973, and upon arrival Skolnick began verbally attacking Fensterwald, accusing him of being a CIA stooge and holding these conferences to find out what real researchers like him were uncovering. At the time, Fensterwald was defending Watergate burglar James McCord, the suspected CIA mole inside CREEP’s plumbers, and Skolnick demanded an independent panel. He got it. But when Skolnick’s panel began, a kook named Amos Hickock began raving about assassination links to the KGB and also announced the Three Tramps were Hunt, Barker and Sturgis of recent Watergate fame. The links from the Kennedy assassination to Watergate were just surfacing, and this was certainly an explosive allegation that tore through the research community like a tornado!

Here’s a little-known factoid: Four pictures of the Three Tramps were first published in Computers and Automation in an article by Richard Sprague on the same day the Watergate burglary appeared in print in the Washington Post.

Also attending that conference in 1973 was A.J. Weberman, who would soon team up with a former McGovern staffer to write a book called Coup d’etat In America. Weberman was a real character. One of the original Zippies, he was also a huge pot dealer on New York’s Lower East Side, and used some profits to help fund a military training camp for potential Mossad agents in the Catskills. Weberman operated with near-impunity for decades before he got ratted out by a former associate who turned State’s evidence and gave up the info on his secret Dutch bank account. After serving his time, Weberman wanted to immigrate to Israel, but couldn’t take the theocracy and quickly moved back to New York, where he seems to be a dirty tricks operative for the Democratic Party these days. When asked about Mossad connections to 9/11, Weberman explodes and orders me to leave the country while accusing me of being “a self-hating Jew.” Real independent research does not seem to be in the forefront of his activity list these days.

Chip Berlet is a close associate of Weberman. And when Weberman was researching his book on the JFK assassination in Washington DC, he often stayed at Berlet’s apartment. His real name, by the way, is John Foster Berlet, son of Reserve Army Lt. Col. George Numa Berlet. Berlet mostly spent the late sixties and early seventies photographing tens of thousands of demonstrators at peace and/or pot rallies, something that surely would have been a valuable resource for intel.

And suspiciously enough, Berlet was on the staff for the CIA-infested and controlled National Student Association, while his mentor, David Ifshin would go on to become general counsel for the American Israel Public Affairs Council (AIPAC). Meanwhile, Berlet evolved into the primary mainstream source for debunking conspiracy theories involving the Federal Reserve.

Berlet invented the word “conspiracism,” a fake disease that one day may be enough to get us all locked up on psyche wards for not believing the official stories handed down by the major media to explain events like JFK assassination or 9/11. Berlet has helped construct the future modern inquisition, where independent researchers become excommunicated agents of the devil just for holding heretical beliefs.

The upshot of Weberman’s book was that two of the Three Tramps were Hunt and Sturgis.

Thus the Three Tramps photos became an opening salvo of disinfo on the CIA’s Watergate misdirection operations. Watergate was actually a CIA-sponsored coup against Nixon, who had little clue of the forces rallied against him, just as JFK had little clue of the CIA-sponsored trap he drove into in Dealey Plaza that day.

Weberman claims to have solved the case in 1975, and in a way, he did, for the book speculated that the head of counterintelligence of the CIA headed the assassination, and it was run through an executive action program initially set-up with mostly Cuban exiles, and the reason they killed Kennedy was because he was working towards peace instead of war. Weberman didn’t mention anyone by name (except Hunt and Sturgis), which seems odd, especially since the head of counterintelligence was well-known at the time: James Angleton. However, Weberman’s basic outline of the facts in 1975 was completely correct and later in life he would target Angleton as an instigator. But by insisting Hunt and Sturgis were the shooters, and that the Tramps photo proved this, Weberman, in fact, created a rabbit hole that sucked up most of the research community. It would take years for the real Tramps identity to emerge.

The tall tramp turned out to be Charles Harrelson, while the old man tramp turned out to be a forger for Meyer Lansky. Meanwhile, the Silvia Odio incident (which proved a conspiracy beyond Oswald) was documented in the book, but never really picked up on and run with until Anthony Summers came along many years later.

If anything, Hunt and Sturgis were used to deflect attention away from the real killers. They were fixers and experts in propaganda and disinfo. Sturgis was probably to the JFK assassination as Lt. Vreeland was to 9/11.