SBD. Nice but complicated post. That's not surprising. Any time a serious reader/writer wanders into the Kennedy killing, things become tangled and outrageously speculative. I know. I wandered into the forest from the OC (organized crime) fields a couple of years ago and spent some time lost among the trees. Criminal/political conspiracies are necessarily loaded with secrets, facts that are unverifiable, linkages that may or may not mean anything. But one mother lode of facts is seldom exploited. That being the assassinations select committee that dug into the 1963 killing of Kennedy in 1978.
The subcommittee's principal researcher was a former NYPD OC expert named Ralph Salerno. He was a giant in the law enforcement world but little known outside it. His was trusted enough that he was given access to tens of thousands of pages of transcripts from mostly-illegal FBI wiretaps of major Cosa Nostra figures compiled after JEH finally admitted that the organization existed. Salerno reported to the subcommittee that JFK and RFK were loathed and feared by organized crime. Bobby, particularly, took on Jimmy Hoffa and other mobsters beginning in the mid-1950s. When the new President made his brother attorney general in 1961, the federal war on organized crime became serious. Sam Giancana of Chicago was overheard on one of the illegal wiretaps saying that if Bobby wasn't stopped, the Mob was going to have to move "all our whorehouses to Gary, Indiana." Other leading mobsters in at least a dozen major cities were heard to voice explicit threats against the entire Kennedy family. (Look up Salerno's report on organized crime and assassinations in the Congressional records of the subcommittee.)
I can't say that I am entirely persuaded on the question of who killed JFK (and maybe even his brother in 1968) but the material from the FBI's most secret files paints a vivid picture of the state of conflict between the secret syndicate that operated in 25 cities across the country and the FBI, which continued to mount these secret intelligence-gathering wiretaps well into the 1970s. Other sources, writing later, tended to support the theory that Ralph Salerno developed. Jimmy Hoffa's lawyer, Frank Ragano, believed firmly that two mobsters undertook the Kennedy killing and were tacitly supported by the rest of La Cosa Nostra's leadership. (Yeah, I know, things just fell down the rabbit hole.) Whatever the truth will probably never be fully ascertained but that's true of organized-crime conspiracies in general, ranging from the founding of what we call The Mafia in Palermo's citrus-exporting business in the 1850s to the various drug cartels in Mexico, Central and South America today. There are deep OC secrets entwined in local, national and regional politics. Easy, comforting narratives are regularly promulgated by ruling elites (I know, I know, the rabbit hole gets pretty deep) to explain away uncomfortable realities but the "real" truths keep popping up and showing themselves, only to disappear again underground.
At least that's how it appears to me, which is why I will read Kulwin and some of the other links you mention. Like you, I don't owe the establishment any particular deference.
Kinda Oscar documentary adjacent, but has anyone seen Women Talking or read Mariam Toews' book and know how close it was to the real story?
SBD. Nice but complicated post. That's not surprising. Any time a serious reader/writer wanders into the Kennedy killing, things become tangled and outrageously speculative. I know. I wandered into the forest from the OC (organized crime) fields a couple of years ago and spent some time lost among the trees. Criminal/political conspiracies are necessarily loaded with secrets, facts that are unverifiable, linkages that may or may not mean anything. But one mother lode of facts is seldom exploited. That being the assassinations select committee that dug into the 1963 killing of Kennedy in 1978.
The subcommittee's principal researcher was a former NYPD OC expert named Ralph Salerno. He was a giant in the law enforcement world but little known outside it. His was trusted enough that he was given access to tens of thousands of pages of transcripts from mostly-illegal FBI wiretaps of major Cosa Nostra figures compiled after JEH finally admitted that the organization existed. Salerno reported to the subcommittee that JFK and RFK were loathed and feared by organized crime. Bobby, particularly, took on Jimmy Hoffa and other mobsters beginning in the mid-1950s. When the new President made his brother attorney general in 1961, the federal war on organized crime became serious. Sam Giancana of Chicago was overheard on one of the illegal wiretaps saying that if Bobby wasn't stopped, the Mob was going to have to move "all our whorehouses to Gary, Indiana." Other leading mobsters in at least a dozen major cities were heard to voice explicit threats against the entire Kennedy family. (Look up Salerno's report on organized crime and assassinations in the Congressional records of the subcommittee.)
I can't say that I am entirely persuaded on the question of who killed JFK (and maybe even his brother in 1968) but the material from the FBI's most secret files paints a vivid picture of the state of conflict between the secret syndicate that operated in 25 cities across the country and the FBI, which continued to mount these secret intelligence-gathering wiretaps well into the 1970s. Other sources, writing later, tended to support the theory that Ralph Salerno developed. Jimmy Hoffa's lawyer, Frank Ragano, believed firmly that two mobsters undertook the Kennedy killing and were tacitly supported by the rest of La Cosa Nostra's leadership. (Yeah, I know, things just fell down the rabbit hole.) Whatever the truth will probably never be fully ascertained but that's true of organized-crime conspiracies in general, ranging from the founding of what we call The Mafia in Palermo's citrus-exporting business in the 1850s to the various drug cartels in Mexico, Central and South America today. There are deep OC secrets entwined in local, national and regional politics. Easy, comforting narratives are regularly promulgated by ruling elites (I know, I know, the rabbit hole gets pretty deep) to explain away uncomfortable realities but the "real" truths keep popping up and showing themselves, only to disappear again underground.
At least that's how it appears to me, which is why I will read Kulwin and some of the other links you mention. Like you, I don't owe the establishment any particular deference.