Electronic security expert John Martino talked with friends and family about his foreknowledge of a JFK plot.
Somebody did talk. His name was John Martino. In 1963 he was an anti-Castro militant who mixed with organized crime figures and CIA officers. His story is one of the clearest indicators that opponents of JFK’s Cuba policy had foreknowledge that President Kennedy might be assassinated in Dallas.
To put it another way, those who doubt there was a conspiracy, need to address John Martino’s story. It is corroborated in multiple ways.
Martino, a native of New Jersey, was a petty racketeer as a young man with arrests for gambling and loan sharking. In the 1950s, he developed an expertise in electronic equipment related to gambling. He gravitated to south Florida and then to Havana where his skills won him a security job at the casino in the new Deauville Hotel in the Cuban capital. Havana was then dominated by organized crime syndicates who reaped big profits from gambling and related tourist attractions.
When Fidel Castro’s revolutionary movement took power in 1959, the Deauville and other hotels offering gambling and prostitution were closed. Martino was arrested for criticizing Castro and spent three years in jail, a bitter experience that he detailed in his vivid book “I Was Castro’s Prisoner.”
Upon his release in 1962, Martino threw himself into the CIA’s clandestine war against Castro. A publicity tour for the book took him to New Orleans and Dallas in the fall of 1963 where he associated with other anti-Castro activists embittered by JFK’s Cuba policy.
In the days after JFK was killed, Martino devoted considerable effort to linking accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald to the Cuban government. Martino and others claimed that Oswald had gone to Cuba (a claim that has never been verified). Without supporting evidence, Martino gained attention from investigators but convinced few of his claims that Oswald acted at Castro’s behest.
A decade later, Martino was dying and he knew it. In 1975, he started telling a different story about the events of 1963, confessing to two acquaintances that he had participated in a conspiracy to assassinate President Kennedy.
His first confessor was John Cummings, an investigative reporter at New York’s Newsday, who had covered Martino’s release from Castro’s prison in 1962 and stayed in contact with him over the years.
“He told me he’d been part of the assassination of Kennedy,” Cummings recounted later. “He wasn’t in Dallas pulling the trigger, but he was involved. He implied that his role was delivering money, facilitating things. He asked me not to write it while he was alive.”
It is worth noting that Cummings was an award winning reporter who did not make his reputation by believing tall tales.
The second person to whom Martino confided was a former business partner named Fred Claassen. He said Martino told him:
“The anti-Castro people put Oswald together. Oswald didn’t know who he was working for–he was just ignorant of who was really putting him together. Oswald was to meet his contact at the Texas Theater [the movie house where Oswald was arrested]. They were to meet Oswald in the theater and get him out of the country, and then eliminate him. Oswald made a mistake….there was no way we could get to him. They had Ruby kill him.”
Martino’s widow Florence declined to talk to congressional investigators
in the 1970s, but later acknowledged her husband’s story to British author
Anthony Summers. She said that her husband had advance knowledge of
JFK’s assassination. “Flo, they’re going to kill him,” she recalls him saying
in November 1963. “They’re going to kill him when he gets to Texas.”
Martino’s son, Edward, then a senior in high school, recalls that on Friday
Nov. 22, 1963 his father told him to stay home from school and listen to
the radio. When the news came from Dallas, “my father went white as a
sheet. But it wasn’t like ‘Gee whiz.’ It was more like confirmation.”
Ed Martino, now a business consultant and custom software developer, has not
profited in any way from telling this story. Nor did his mother, now deceased.
Summers reported the Martino story in Vanity Fair magazine in 1994 and in his 1998 book (co-authored with Robbyn Swan), “Not in Your Lifetime” (an updated version of which will be published this year). Historian David Kaiser reported Ed Martino’s story in his book The Road to Dallas, which was published by Harvard University Press.
The most complete version of Martino’s involvement in the anti-Castro movement and his subsequent confession is found my 2010 book “Somebody Would Have Talked.” (You can buy it here.)
There were other people who showed foreknowledge that JFK would be killed in Dallas but none whose story is so well-documented as John Martino. He was somebody who talked.
Video: Larry Hancock talks about John Martino as a “linchpin” of the JFK story.
Read: Chapter 1 from “Somebody Would Have Talked.”
His wife denied everything to HSCA.
According to her son, who was in the background during the interviews, she was scared to death at the time. As was he. She did provide certain materials to them which were helpful in confirming things such as his two trips to Dallas – one for which there was no explanation, the other which involved a speaking engagement. In addition, shortly before her own death she did admit to the remarks by her husband, just as her son Edward has now done.
— Larry
Hi Larry. I find the section in your book about the “casino alumni” most interesting. I am finishing the memoirs of a man (almost 90 yrs old) and his “partnership” with Johnny Rosselli. I am pretty sure I have a solid link between an associate of Rosselli and several of the alumni. I have new information on Rosselli that should prove out to be helpful to the story of JFK.
Incidently, I knew Ed Becker quite well and still associate with his pal Tony M., who did a lot of research for Ed. Would love to speak to you.
Gene
She should have spoke up when it counted.
It would have been nice for a number of people to have spoken to the HSCA at that point. As a counter, two of Martino’s closet personal friends, who may have actually have gotten more of a story from him than did his wife, did speak up to the HSCA. They independently provided virtually the same information which he had expressed to them shortly before he passed away.
I would like to see more facts to back up what he is saying he, apart the old changing his story years later. It’s highly unlikely that LHO made it into to Cuba to see Castro, so his story’s end there.
Mark, of course we would all like to see more facts – what we do have is a great deal of corroboration that Martino knew the people he was talking about, that he worked with them in anti-Castro actions, that he was trusted by them and that he would have fit in exactly the limited role he describes. We have the facts that he was in New Orleans that summer, he went to Dallas twice (one trip with no explanation), that one of his closest exile friends was in Dallas for some time before the assassination and at the time of the assassination.
We can also validate that Martino was personally associated with and in contact with two CIA officers who were likely involved in the conspiracy. Hopefully you read Chapter 1 where you find that but indeed the entire book is devoted to locating what facts are available and corroborating Martino as a credible witness to what he describes.
Dick Billings was the LIFE reporter who first wrote about Gov. Connally’s doubts about the number of bullets, and went on to introduce the world to Jim Garrison. (His subsequent falling out with Garrison led to suggestions his true purpose was to undermine Garrison’s investigation.) Billings went on to work with Robert Blakey and the HSCA; they wrote a book that pointed to the mafia.
At any rate, in my discussions with Billings, Martino appeared often. Billings said it was Martino who facilitated his meeting with William Pawley, which led to his taking part in the CIA mission “Operation Tilt” — the unsuccessful mission to retrieve supposed Soviet military defectors from Cuba. After the assassination, Billings told me, Martino would call him and make cryptic comments. Billings said he still kicks himself for not pursuing Martino more doggedly. He said something bordering on snobbery kept him from engaging Martino.
You should post LBJ’s post-White House interview with Walter Cronkite where Johnson mentions the possibility that others were involved in 11/22. Johnson’s comments left me with the distinct impression that he didn’t believe the Warren Commission — which he appointed. The segment wasn’t broadcast but I think you can Google it.
Lyndon Johnson told many people that Fidel Castro killed JFK. He tried that line as early as 11/32/63 with Ted Sorenson who did not buy it. This is also the favorite line of CIA operatives, along with the “Russia did it” scenario. LBJ perhaps once speculated Diem’s family did it. But LBJ was telling the truth within 6 weeks of the JFK assassination when he told Madeleine Brown on 12/31/63 that Texas oil executives & the CIA did it. LBJ also later told his chief of staff Marvin Watson that the CIA did it.
LBJ’s main smokescreen was that Fidel Castro did it.
“11/32/63″ Saturday date of LBJ talk with Sorenson.
11/23/63 sorry for all the typos
Actually the Cronkite incident was only one of a number of instances in which Johnson made similar remarks to people – I devote some three chapters in SWHT to Johnson and a great number of his remarks and activities following the assassination. The big difference is that all those remarks were made privately or in small groups and we hear about them afters from those hearing them. It would have had a much different impact if he had actually said that on national TV – which of course is why he realized it and made sure it didn’t get into the broadcast.
An equally interesting series of events, also involving Johnson, occurred after John Roselli – who was provably involved with the CIA in Castro assassination efforts, offered proof of a conspiracy to the mainstream media as well various agencies and Earl Warren. Nobody would touch that with a very long stick…Johnson was quite concerned over the story and we have transcripts of his various calls discussing it.
Interesting about Roselli. How can I get more info about that?
Why would a mob figure like Roselli have offered proof of a conspiracy to the media and Warren?
John, I cover Rosell at length in the book SWHT plus there is a appendix in the book, which provides considerable information from recent research into some five years of FBI surveillance information on him during the early 1960′s.
As to why he would offer information on a conspiracy, its a bit of a complex story but he did it at a point in time when the Garrison investigation had not yet hit the media but was becoming known to certain exile figures in Miami because of early work by Garrison’s investigators there.
Roselli’s outreach accomplished two things, first it served as a test as to whether anyone in DC seriously wanted to pursue actual evidence of conspiracy (which Roselli offered) – his offer was passed to the FBI, the SS, Warren and finally to Johnson. Also, since Roselli offered specific evidence pointing towards Castro, it could have served as a preemptive strike to divert any effort to re-examine the case. It was very much in sync with a number of leads towards Castro which had been planted with both the FBI the media at the time of the assassination – some of that having been done by the subject of this thread, John Martino.
Since we’re on the subject, it may be worth reminding everyone what happened to Roselli. He was found dead in a 55-gallon drum after testifying before the Church Committee about Cuba and JFK in 1976.
To elaborate a bit, actually Roselli testified to the HSCA and reportedly he was quite entertaining, giving some good stories and focusing almost entirely on the early days of the poison attempts.
At some point in his later testimony he began to respond to more detailed questions and, again reportedly, he mentioned a couple of real names of individuals involved in the early attempts. After realizing that they had not really pursued any potential relationship between the assassination project against Castro and the Kennedy assassination the HSCA scheduled him for a return visit. In the interim, either his lawyers or HSCA staff members, its unclear which, were talking about Roselli’s remarks, including his mentioning names. Of course that opened the question of whether or not he was beginning to talk too loosely.
After his murder, the investigators pursued a number of individuals who had been reported have been in contact with him over the Castro project. They also pursued leads that Roselli had been traveling back to L.A, and might have been trying to insert himself back in certain deals there – as with Giancana, or for that matter Hoffa, once you leave people get really sensitive if you appear to be butting back in..
In a biography of Roselli, comments were obtained from a friend to the effect that Roselli had been warned about contracts on him and that the Cubans were coming after him. Beyond that the nature of his murder, after leaving for a fishing trip with unnamed friends, suggests that he was murdered by people he knew.