‘Reporters never followed up’

Gary Hart on the John F. Kennedy assassination:

WASHINGTON — As the 50th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s death nears, former presidential candidate Gary Hart, a member of the Senate committee that investigated JFK’s assassination, said that the press had failed in its responsibility to investigate the truth behind his killing.

Hart served on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Agencies, known as the Church committee, after chairman Frank Church. He recalled that while the committee was investigating the connection between the assassination, the Mafia and plots against Cuban President Fidel Castro, two of the three main figures involved were also killed.

“It’s amazing to me that American journalism never followed up on that story very much, because if you found out who killed those two guys, you might have some really interesting information on your hands,” Hart, who served as a Democratic senator from Colorado for two terms, told HuffPost in a recent interview.

There were “all kinds of leads” — had reporters followed them, he said. “I went down to Miami when [Johnny] Roselli was killed and talked to this Dade County sheriff from the Miami Police Department, and they showed me pictures of him being fished out of the water in the barrel and how he’d been killed — nightmarish stuff. And [Momo Salvatore] Giancana was killed in his own basement with six bullet holes in his throat with a Chicago police car and an FBI car outside his house,” he recounted.

According to CIA documents released in 2007, the agency hired Johnny Roselli, a high-ranking mobster, to eliminate Fidel Castro, offering to pay him $150,000. Roselli reportedly declined the money and worked with former FBI agent Robert A. Maheu; Giancana, Al Capone’s Chicago mob successor; and Santo Trafficante Jr., a mobster involved in Cuban operations, to unsuccessfully poison Castro with pills. Roselli disappeared soon after testifying before the Church committee, and his body was found inside an oil drum near North Miami Beach. Giancana was found dead at his Chicago home before he could testify to the Church committee.

While alive, Giancana and Roselli also reportedly communicated with Kennedy. In a 1988 interview with People Magazine, Judith Campbell Exner claimed she had an affair with the president, and that during that relationship she served as a courier between the president and Roselli and Giancana. The president’s brother, Robert Kennedy — then-attorney general — called for an investigation on Giancana.

The deaths of Roselli and Giancana in 1975 and 1976 occurred amid the Church committee’s ongoing investigations surrounding Kennedy’s assassination. That coincidence, Hart said, was suspicious enough to warrant press attention, and he was surprised that the press didn’t jump on the story.

“I was always amazed in that particular instance of the CIA-Mafia connection and the Cuban connection 12 years — coming up 12 years — after Kennedy was killed that somebody didn’t go after that story,” he said. “New York Times, Washington Post; anybody. And they didn’t. They reported the deaths and that was it, and the strange quirky coincidence, you know, but nothing more.”