From The Advocatee — Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a fun obituary of an unrepentant crook with a delicious name, Frenchy Brouillete.
Marcello’s name cropped up in various JFK assassination theories, and a House Select Committee report in 1979 mentioned “credible associations relating both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby to figures having a relationship, albeit tenuous, with Marcello’s crime family or organization.” In the Randazzo book published last year, Brouillette describes Ruby — who killed presumed Kennedy assassin Oswald — as “another Marcello family goombah.
The best-selling author tells the Christian Science Monitor how he weaves the JFK story into his new novel ‘The Bone Tree,’ while trying to hew to historical fact.
Anthony Summers, biographer and former BBC correspondent, has been writing about JFK’s assassination for three decades for publications ranging from The Times of London to Vanity Fair. In my possibly biased opinion, I think his book, “Not In Your Lifetime,” is the best single volume on the JFK assassination and its confusing investigatory aftermath.
I sent him some questions by email and he responded as follows:
JFKFacts: You started reporting on the JFK story in the late 1970s. You were one of the first professional journalists to look deeply into the JFK assassination story. What did you discover?
Anthony Summers: At the time of the assassination occurred, I’d been a student at Oxford. I had reporting ambitions, and Dallas was almost the first real story I covered. I’d been working for a TV program during the vacations, and the program’s editor phoned within an hour of the assassination – it was early evening in the UK – to say he was gathering a team and chartering a plane to Texas. Could I drop everything and come?
Historian David Kaiser makes the case in this C-SPAN video that organized crime bosses Carlos Marcello and Santos Trafficante were behind JFK’s assassination.
Personally I don’t agree with Kaiser’s interpretation but he is an excellent historian whose book The Road to Dallas: The Assassination of John F. Kennedy (published by Harvard University Press in 2009) contains much valuable original research. Of all the authors who have argued for the “Mafia did it” theory, he is the most capable.
Marcello’s name cropped up in various JFK assassination theories, and a House Select Committee report in 1979 mentioned “credible associations relating both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby to figures having a relationship, albeit tenuous, with Marcello’s crime family or organization.” In the Randazzo book published last year, Brouillette describes Ruby — who killed presumed Kennedy assassin Oswald — as “another Marcello family goombah.
