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Robert Kennedy's crusade against the lesser-known Marcello, whose Mob territory embraced Texas, was almost as intense. Born in Tunisia of Sicilian parents who moved to the U.S. in 1910, Marcello later used a phony Guatemalan birth registration to avoid deportation to Italy. Fully aware that Marcello was not a Guatemalan, Kennedy in 1961 nevertheless had Immigration agents hustle him aboard a 78-seat jet as its lone passenger and deposit him in Guatemala City. Marcello and his American lawyer were later flown to El Salvador, where soldiers dumped the two expensively dressed men in the mountains. Marcello claimed he fainted three times and broke several ribs before finding his way to a small airport. Slipping secretly back into New Orleans, he vowed revenge against the Kennedys.
But if the Mafia had a strong motive to kill the President, where are the connections to Oswald, the executioner, and Ruby, the silencer? They are almost too numerous to count, if you accept the claims of Scheim, a manager of computerized information at the National Institutes of Health. He seems to have amassed every reference ever printed about the J.F.K. assassination figures and mobsters, then woven these threads to fit a Mafia-hit theory.
Some of the connections are provocative. Take Oswald. His father Robert died of a heart attack in August 1939. Lee, born two months later, spent much of his first three years with Lillian and Charles Murret, his aunt and uncle, in New Orleans. In April 1963, while looking for a job in New Orleans, he stayed with the Murrets. Charles Murret was a bookmaker in a gambling operation run by Marcello, and for a few months Oswald allegedly collected bets for his uncle. Marcello and other New Orleans gangsters thus may have been aware that the much publicized former Marine defector was in their midst.
That summer, when Oswald passed out leaflets for his one-man chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, his literature listed 544 Camp Street as the chapter office. That building housed the offices of Guy Banister, a private investigator and former FBI agent. Banister had been hired by Marcello to help him fight court battles. Working for Banister was David Ferrie, a former airline pilot who had publicly berated Kennedy for the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. In 1955 Ferrie headed a New Orleans squadron of the Civil Air Patrol. One of his cadets was Oswald. Some witnesses thought they saw the two together in Clinton, La., in September 1963.
On the two weekends before the Kennedy assassination, Ferrie huddled with Marcello at a farmhouse on the mobster's delta property. Ferrie later told the FBI that he was helping Marcello map strategy for a perjury and conspiracy trial then under way. (Marcello was acquitted on the day of the assassination.) On the night of the assassination Ferrie drove 350 miles through a rainstorm to Houston, arriving at about 4 a.m. He later insisted that this was a hunting trip, but he spent hours making calls from public phones at a skating rink.
To the conspiracy writers, all this meant that Marcello had been using Ferrie to help plot the killing of Kennedy. Ferrie's hasty trip, they imply, was to make sure, from telephones beyond Marcello's haunts, that Ruby killed Oswald.