In mid-November of 1988, approaching the twenty-fifth anniversary of John Kennedy’s assassination, I was sitting on the couch at the Tater Palace with a trusty colleague of mine, Will Clay, watching a special produced by legendary investigative journalist, Jack Anderson, that practically made our eyes pop out! The title is: American Expose: Who Murdered JFK? I have been searching for a copy of this ground-breaking video document ever since then, but it’s impossible to find.
One scene from the special is a simulation of crime boss Johnny Roselli’s ghastly death. On August 9th, 1976 a 55-gallon steel fuel drum was spotted floating in Dumfounding Bay, near Miami. Johnny’s body had been stuffed in this drum and dropped in the Gulf of Mexico. Who killed Roselli and why’d they do it? This is one of the reasons why I’m trying to get my hands on Jack Anderson’s video.
More recent research has me digging around on a handful of web pages and scrounging about my disheveled condo (think David Ferrie’s apartment), looking frantically for my copy of an important monograph, All American Mafioso: The Johnny Roselli Story (by Charles Rappleye and Ed Becker). I just remembered, I put the damn book in storage, another great argument for using a Kindle. What am I looking for exactly, you might wonder?
Well, I need to know the actual date that Jack Anderson scored that last interview with Johnny, shortly before he was eliminated. As you might recall, Roselli had testified before the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on two different occasions, June 24 and September 22, 1975. Then on April 23, 1976 the committee wanted Johnny to testify yet again, later in the summer, I surmise. Somebody sees a red flag with this new subpoena!
Okay, so I’m not tying it all together very tightly! That’s because the information has not been pieced together properly in my head yet. I can’t find anything! I need American Expose and I really need copies of Jack Anderson’s original columns (Merry-Go-Round) from the mid-1960s (regarding the plots to kill Castro by the CIA and the Mafia), which as far as I know, have never been collected, bundled, and published in one volume.
The George Washington University has Anderson’s papers, so maybe I’ll have to take a trip to Washington DC and snoop around these valuable archives. What did Johnny Roselli tell Jack in that final interview before he lost his life? Roselli’s ‘basic cover story,’ that he had told his attorney, Edward Morgan, was that the assassins recruited by the CIA and the Mob had been busted by Fidel, then he turned them loose on Kennedy.
Jack Ruby was used to eliminate Lee Oswald, since Lee could tie the Outfit to the assassination. Johnny tells it this way, but was this simply a cover story to make it look like Castro killed Kennedy, when really it was the Mob, the CIA, and possibly ultra-right-wing oil men? And consider the possibility that these ruthless power brokers suspected that Johnny was about to whistle a different tune. Yea, I need to pay those archivists a visit over at the Gelman Library.
The Jack Anderson Collection: Homepage
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1hlGr4rQFE
See More: Judyth Piazza interviews Lee Harvey Oswald’s Lover Judyth Vary Baker on the American Perspective Radio Program
