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But wait. For the Mafia-did-it advocates, the plot is much thicker. In their view, the man who rode a bus to Mexico City before the assassination, talking to travelers about his plans to meet Fidel Castro and then raising a ruckus at the Cuban embassy, probably was not Oswald. More likely, he was an impostor, dispatched by Mafia schemers so that when the real Oswald killed the President, a Cuban-Soviet connection would be readily assumed. The existence of someone posing as Oswald would, of course, be proof in itself of a conspiracy.
The possibility of an Oswald double is emphasized by the recent pin-it-on- the-Mob authors: John H. Davis (Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy) and David E. Scheim (Contract on America: The Mafia Murder of President John F. Kennedy). Earlier, G. Robert Blakey and Richard N. Billings suggested that underworld and anti-Castro schemers had joined to use Oswald as a handy fall guy (The Plot to Kill the President).
As evidence that someone was making sure that the real Oswald would be pinned to the crime of the century, Davis cites long-familiar sightings of "Oswald" in the Dallas area before the assassination: practice shooting at a rifle range, acting rude while buying ammunition, test-driving a car and claiming he would soon have "a lot of money" to buy it (Marina insists that he did not drive).
Scheim and Davis readily accept this Oswald as an impostor. But both conveniently tend to consider other alleged sightings of Oswald as genuine: sitting in a New Orleans bar with an associate of mobster Marcello's and taking money under the table; traveling with another Marcello crony three months before the assassination. In this selective reasoning, neither author seems to consider that some or all of the witnesses could be mistaken, their memories swayed by the TV images of the assassin's face.
Yet, as most of the books explain, the Mob had ample reason to want Kennedy out of the way. As early as 1957, he sat on the Senate Rackets Committee chaired by Arkansas' John McClellan; Robert Kennedy was its chief counsel. The Kennedys joined in the committee's stiff grilling of such gangsters as Los Angeles' Mickey Cohen, Louisiana's Marcello and Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, whose underworld ties presumably led to his murder in 1975.
After Robert Kennedy became Attorney General in 1961, the Justice Department waged a war against organized crime. Despite the foot dragging of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who had long claimed there was no Mafia, the Justice Department indicted 116 members of the Mob. Bobby also undertook a personal vendetta against Hoffa, who was convicted of jury tampering and pension-fund fraud in separate trials in 1964.