Some portentous voices out of the underworld a quarter-century ago:
"Kennedy's not going to make it to the ((1964)) election -- he's going to be hit."
-- Santo Trafficante, the top Florida mobster, to an FBI informer in August 1962.
"You know what they say in Sicily: if you want to kill a dog, you don't cut off the tail, you cut off the head."
-- Carlos Marcello, Mafia boss in New Orleans, to an acquaintance that same month, explaining why President John Kennedy, not Attorney General Robert Kennedy, would be killed.
"There is a price on the President's head. Somebody will kill Kennedy when he comes down South."
-- Bernard Tregle, a New Orleans restaurant owner allegedly associated with Marcello, within hearing of one of his employees in April 1963.
Out of the mouths of such sinister characters the assassination-conspiracy theorists of the 1980s have fashioned the latest in a long-running series of explanations of what may forever remain unexplainable: why Lee Harvey Oswald killed John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963, exactly 25 years ago this week. In an anniversary spate of books and TV specials, the trendy theory is that the Mafia arranged the President's murder and the silencing of Oswald by Dallas strip-joint owner Jack Ruby. This, of course, clashes with the Warren Commission's conclusion that Oswald acted alone for his own twisted reasons and that Ruby impetuously killed the assassin to spare Jacqueline Kennedy the ordeal of a Dallas trial of her husband's slayer.
As the excerpts from James Reston Jr.'s forthcoming book show, there are new twists on the lone-assassin conclusion as well. His contention that Oswald may have intended to kill Texas Governor John Connally rather than Kennedy was rather perfunctorily dismissed by the Warren Commission. Although Marina Oswald had testified to this belief, the commission's lawyers found her generally inconsistent and discounted much of what she said. The commission relied on Texas prosecutor Henry Wade for evaluation of the alleged conversation between Oswald and Ruby, overheard at Ruby's Carousel Club by Dallas lawyer Carroll Jarnagin. Wade found Jarnagin sincere in thinking he had heard Oswald offer to kill Connally so that gangsters could open up the state for their rackets, but he told the commission that the lawyer nonetheless had failed a lie-detector test on the subject.
Other theories persist: that Oswald, an avowed Marxist who had gone from service as a U.S. Marine to spend more than two years in the Soviet Union, returned as a homicidal tool of the KGB; that when he tried to go back to the Soviet Union via Cuba in September 1963, Fidel Castro's embassy in Mexico City encouraged him to kill Kennedy. The reason: Castro knew that the CIA had plotted with Chicago mobster Sam Giancana and Hollywood boss John Roselli to kill him.
Support, of a sort, for the Castro-as-mastermind theory recently came from David W. Belin, a top counsel for the Warren Commission. In his new book, Final Disclosure, Belin says that "it is possible" Oswald was part of a Cuban conspiracy. It may have developed, Belin writes, when Oswald visited Mexico City.