THAT DAY… November, 1963…

You prince and king and everybody's hero,

Idol of the poor,

Friend of intellect and all we knew to be

In our reborn post-war world.

Could any mature man or woman

Not weep

THAT day . . . when

Ignominy raped our youthful joy?

Why . . . oh God . . . why????


The cry of Dallas town

Will echo down the empty alleys of time

As long as there is any wind

To blow empty papers along deserted city streets.

Until the last corn stalk

In western civilization upholds an autumn sky.

Until the last grave is dug

In what we call.

America . . .


Don't tell us, critic man, there are no

Messiahs of politics, no kings in democratic states. . .

Grown men were not ashamed to cry. . .

That day.

Their women kissed the dust with women's tears.

Women have no monopoly on weeping.

We know to live is to weep

Sometimes. . .


That day

Everyone of us knew

A little part of ancient Greece.

Tragedy became large, wide-eyed,

Horribly personal. The terrible events were echoes,

Tapes and files and heart-rending photos

Of a world's pathos and grief we had

Always known, since our Virgilian days, our first touch by Euripedes.

Some part of each of us died

That day. Our own red blood spurted out in Dallas.

The ballads now sing "In Dallas-town…"

The elegies will sing a hundred years from now

And carry on the soft winds

Tragedy's tale…

God will there will be elegies…


In a world not quite all western…

A hundred years from now…

Thelma Jacqueline Straw

The Tale of Two Jacks: The Gangster and the President II

Denis Foley, a forensic anthropologist and historical archeologist, is author of the true crime thriller Lemuel Smith and the Compulsion to Kill (NK Burns Pub., 2006). He has a passion for researching the Irish in America whether they be gangsters, martyrs or rebels; most recently “On Tour and Exiled; James Connolly in America 1902-1905” in the 2013 issue of Saothar, the Journal of the Irish Labor History Society. He is working on his debut novel, Murder Most Irish, set in the Bronx and the Inwood Section of Manhattan. This is part two of his Tale of Two Jacks.

Robert Knightly

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Part 2: A President Killed by Gangsters?

The Joe Kennedy-Dan O’Connell connection was cemented again in early 1960 when Joe called Dan to get his endorsement of his son’s run for the presidency during the Democratic Primaries. The two business partners came to an agreement and John F. Kennedy got Albany’s delegates. Later, JFK himself telephoned Dan at his home to say thanks. Robert Kennedy visited Dan O’Connell to get his blessing for his run for Senator from New York in 1968. In a lighter moment, Erastus Corning 2nd’s campaign manager once described the Albany Machine as an organization that would be prosecuted today under the RICO Act. Another Irish-American, Joe Kennedy, might also fall under the statute. Franklin Roosevelt when challenged on his appointment of Joseph Kennedy to the Securities & Exchange Commission reportedly said, “Sometimes it takes a crook to catch a crook.”

Although Joe Kennedy Sr. himself had been mentioned as a presidential contender, the business practices on Wall Street of Roosevelt’s former Ambassador to Great Britain and his isolationist leanings prior to WW II tarred his candidacy as not to be taken seriously. Yet, the senior Kennedy’s illicit contacts with alcohol distributors such as Dan O’Connell and the underworld lords in the Midwest and Middle Atlantic States served his son’s Presidential ambitions.

In his 2007 memoir Point to Point Navigation, published by Random house, Gore Vidal, Jacqueline Kennedy’s distant relative and Kennedy White House insider, repeats the idea of a Mafia conspiracy surrounding the death of JFK. Among the first to embrace this tale was Thomas Hartmann and Lamar Waldron in Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, The Plan For a Coup in Cuba and the Murder of JFK. Hartmann and Waldron tell how three Mafia godfathers, Carlos Marcello (New Orleans), Santo Trafficante (Tampa, Fla. and Havana, Cuba) and Johnny Roselli (Chicago), while in the employ of the Central Intelligence Agency, organized a plot to kill Fidel Castro, called Plan for a Coup in Cuba, code-named the C Day Plan. The three gangsters thought themselves immune from federal prosecution because they were working for the CIA.

During the 1960 elections, Joseph Kennedy reputedly paid off mobsters in Chicago and Philadelphia to deliver inner city wards to his son. Afterward, the gang leaders anticipated an unofficial truce between the new Democratic Administration and themselves. Attorney General Robert Kennedy broke that truce, as Gore Vidal saw it, to seek glory and self-aggrandizement; others believe Robert Kennedy had become genuinely outraged by the extent of mob corruption in American life when he was Chief Counsel to the McClellan Committee’s Investigation of Organized Crime. Naively, perhaps, Robert Kennedy decided to expose and prosecute the underworld as well as labor leaders like Jimmy Hoffa who had Mafia links. When he did this, he put himself and his elder brother in harm’s way. In retaliation, the mobsters initially decided to kill Robert Kennedy, but Carlos Marcello reportedly told Santo Trafficante: “When a dog bothers you, you don’t cut off its tail.” Thus, the murder plot against the Thirty-Fifth President of the United States was hatched. As early as 1962, Trafficante predicted the assassination during a meeting about a Teamster’s loan. Trafficante also told wealthy Cuban exile, Jose Aleman: “Mark my words, this man Kennedy is in trouble, and he will get what is coming to him.” When Aleman suggested Kennedy would be re-elected, Trafficante allegedly said, “No, Jose, he is going to be hit.”

The trio reputedly targeted the President twice before Dallas. Once on November 2,1963, in Chicago but the motorcade was called off, and again aborted in Tampa on November 18,1963, just four days before Dallas. The gangsters’ plot to murder Kennedy was incompletely investigated and subsequently discounted by the Warren Commission, the conspiracy theorists believe. They point to Commission member Allen Welsh Dulles, longest-serving director of the CIA (1953–1961), who had to be aware of the unsavory Mafia-CIA link, having orchestrated earlier assassination plots against Castro. According to biographer Evan Thomas, in Robert Kennedy: His Life (Simon and Schuster, 2002), Robert Kennedy reportedly told his closest aide that Carlos Marcello had ordered his brother’s death. The future Senator from New York and Presidential candidate himself could not reveal publicly the nature of The C Day Plan and Mafia involvement for fear that the Soviet Union would retaliate in kind. This is the substance of the claims of the conspiracy theorists.

America loves its presidents and gangsters. The Irish American community worshiped John F. Kennedy, the first Catholic president, and vicariously enjoyed Legs Diamond’s exploits. Legs’ parents were born in Ireland. Gentleman Jack dated gorgeous showgirls and defied authority. He appeared immortal. The poor Irish exiles, experiencing the endless toil and low status of immigrants, arguably yearned for the independence, glamour and recklessness of the gangster and the legitimacy conferred upon themselves by having one of their own as President.

The deaths of the two Jacks, one shot at close range and the other from a distance of 531 feet, illustrate how America’s illusions can suppress the truth. Legs Diamond died in Albany, shot by the Albany police. Evidence that Dan O’Connell ordered the hit wasn’t revealed, although many in Albany knew, until Pulitzer Prize-winner William Kennedy published O Albany in 1983, and confirmed at length in a filmed interview in the WMHT documentary Prohibition Story: All Over Albany, in 2011. A dying Detective McElveney reportedly told his daughter Betty, when she questioned him as to the circumstances of the Legs Diamond murder: “Fitz knows and he ain’t talkin’, God knows and he ain’t talkin’, and I ain’t talkin’.” But he did talk, they say, when drunk and in the company of his friends at Albany’s Fire Engine Company Four.

Legs’ Watervliet policeman-bodyguard was tactful enough to be absent the night Dets. McElveney and Fitzpatrick executed Legs in his bed. Those who swear by the truism What Goes Around Comes Around wouldn’t blink an eye on hearing that, in 1945, McElveney shot to death his former partner Fitzpatrick, then the Albany Chief of Police, in his office on Eagle Street, over a long-simmering grievance. He pled guilty to Murder 2nd Degree and was sentenced to twenty years in prison, but only served eleven, pardoned by Gov. Averill Harriman in 1957. John McElveney died of cancer in 1968.
In 1977, the Congress set up the Select Committee on Assassinations to reexamine JFK’s murder in Dallas. The New York City Medical Examiner, Michael Baden, was picked to head a team of eight other vastly experienced pathologists. After months of reviewing the forensic evidence, the Committee issued a “hybrid report” (from which Baden dissented): three shots were fired by Oswald from the Texas School Book Depository and a single shot by an unidentified shooter from the grassy knoll above Dealy Plaza. Dr. Baden’s verdict: “People will go on believing what they want to believe.”

© 2015 Denis Foley, PhD, Curator, Lewis Henry Morgan Institute, SUNY-IT, Utica-Rome

Sources:

Baden, Michael, M.D., Unnatural Death: Confessions of a Medical Examiner (Random House, 1989).
Hartman, Thomas and Waldron, Lamar, Ultimate Sacrifice: John and Robert Kennedy, The Plan For a Coup in Cuba and the Murder of JFK (Counterpoint Press, 2008).
Kennedy, William: Legs (Penguin Books, 1975); O Albany (Viking Press, 1983).
Leamer, Laurence, The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963 (Harper Collins, 2001).
Levine, Gary, Jack ‘Legs’ Diamond: Anatomy of a Gangster (Purple Mountain Press, 1995).
Robinson, Frank S., Machine Politics: A Study of Albany’s O’Connells (Transaction Press, 1977);
Robinson, Frank S., Albany’s O’Connell Machine (The Washington Park Spirit, Inc., 1973).
Thomas, Evan, Robert Kennedy: His Life (Simon and Schuster, 2002).
Vidal, Gore, Point-to-Point Navigation (Doubleday, 2006).
Foley, Denis: Field Notes (1981-2015).

That Day…

On November 22, 1963, a motorcade on Dealey Plaza in Dallas, at about 12:30 P.M. changed my life forever.

And yours.

And our nation. Our world. The future of planet earth.

The incident is still the subject of widespread debates, books, films. Has spawned numerous theories and scenarios in fiction, as well as non-fiction.

A moment before the murder, the First Lady of Texas turned to him and said, "Mr. President, you can't say Dallas doesn't love you!"

If you or I wrote that in a novel the editor would probably cut it out. Truth IS stranger than fiction.

Jackie said, moments later, " They have killed my husband! I have his brains in my hand."

I have rarely read a more poignant sentence in any novel…

One of the most amazing facts was that at that time it was not a federal offense to kill the President of the United States!

People often ask, " Where were you… ?"
- December 7, 1941?
- November 22, 1963?
- September 11, 2001?

That day in 1963, a day of lost dreams and dashed hopes, America's sacred honor was stained with Jack's red blood and universal dreams were shattered.

The mystery of who the killer was still haunts us. Was it a lone gunman? The mob? The Soviets? The CIA? The government?

This crime of all crimes to many of us…

The quest for the truth continues. The weeping has not ceased for 50 years…

Where were YOU?
That day?

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THAT DAY . . . . . .( written November 22, 1963)

You prince and king and everybody's hero,
idol of the poor,
friend of intellect and all we knew to be
in our reborn post-war world.
Could any mature man
not weep
THAT day, when ignominy raped our youthful joy?
Why… oh God, why???

The cry of Dallas-town
will echo down the empty alleys of time
as long as there is any wind
to blow limp papers along deserted city streets.
Until the last corn stalk
in western civilization outlines an autumn sky.
Until the last grave is dug
in what we call
America.

Don't tell me, critic-man, there are no
messiahs of politics, no kings in democratic states… or that
grown men are ashamed to cry.

THAT day, their women kissed the dust with
women's tears. But women have no monopoly
on weeping. We know to live is to weep.
Sometimes…

THAT day everyone of us knew
a little part of ancient Greece.
Tragedy became large, wide-eyed,
terribly personal. The horrible events
were echoes, tapes and films and heart-rending photos
of a world's pathos and grief
we had always known, since Virgilian plagues,
those high tragedies by Euripedes, all the Greek-greats of ancient times.

Some part of each of us died
THAT day. Our own red blood
spurted out in Dallas. The ballads now
sing "In Dallas-town…"
The elegies will sing
a hundred years from now
and carry out the long tradition
of tragedy's tale. God will
there will be elegies
in a world not quite
all Western…
A hundred years from now…

Thelma Jacqueline Straw

---

Dear Friends and Colleagues of Crime Writers' Chronicle,
Please share with us where you were… THAT DAY…

tjs

That Day: We Remember…

September 11, 2001, a Tuesday, was a nice Fall day, I think (aging has a way of dimming memory, at least mine, no matter how ‘unforgettable’ the subject). My wife Rose and I left our apartment in Jackson Heights, Queens, earlier than usual that morning to vote: it was Primary Day in New York City. At the polling place, we heard that a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center (just that, nothing more). We went back home to turn on the TV. This is how we remember it:

ROSE: When we saw the plane had hit the Tower and it was burning, I remember thinking I’d better get on the road now before the traffic is impossible. Only a New Yorker could have had such a reaction to a disaster. I owned a boutique called Metaphors on Bedford Avenue at North 6th Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, three blocks from the East River, just opposite the Manhattan waterfront at 23rd Street. Eventually, I got to my store. As I was pulling up the gate, Karen, who owned Luanna’s, an Urban Cowboy boutique across the street, hollered at me to close my store!

“Why?” I shouted back.

“Because the country is under attack.”

“But,” I said, “we have a captive audience today, The subway is shut down.”

“Go home!” she said. So I did.

ROBERT: I was working as a trial lawyer in the Queens Office of the Criminal Defense Division of the Legal Aid Society. The office and the Criminal Courts were on Queens Blvd. in Kew Gardens, a 7-minute ride on the G-train from the Roosevelt Avenue station in Jackson Heights. I took the train; we were a one-car family then and Rose needed it to get to the store. When I arrived, everyone was glued to the TV. Like everyone else, I stayed in the office and watched. What did I feel? Astonished! Did I see the Towers fall? I‘m not sure; maybe one? From the vantage of age 70, I’m convinced that I don’t remember more than I do remember, and depending on how much time has passed, my recollections may be mist-enshrouded.

For example, on November 23, 1963, when President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, I was employed as a copyboy on the New York Journal-American, an afternoon daily, one of the City’s 7 daily newspapers at the time. When the inevitable cliché is asked: And where were you on etc., etc, etc.? – I usually say I was working in the City Room that late morning when Kennedy was shot. But was I? I think I was because I have a vivid recollection of standing immovable in that room with everyone else — editors, reporters, copyboys, pressmen – transfixed by the TV showing . . . something? Announcement of his death in the Dallas Hospital? The Funeral? The assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby? I’m not sure; I’m guessing (always reminds me of the movie, ‘The Mists of Avalon’).

The Courts shut down; the subways, too. I walked the 3 miles home. I had it easier than most.

ROSE: I drove home through Long Island City, Queens, past the 59th Street Bridge which thousands of people were spilling off onto Northern Boulevard, all of them fleeing Manhattan. I stopped and offered a ride to a foursome of Indian-looking people, hoping they lived in my neighborhood of Jackson Heights, also known as ‘Little India’. I was disappointed and more than a little embarrassed to see very few cars stopping to offer rides. The man owned a newsstand in Midtown and the three women were his employees. They thanked me for being “a human being,” but alas, they lived in Flushing. I had to take them all the way, I could do no less. As we talked, I asked if they were from Pakistan. “No, No,” they cried, “India, India!”

Past Jackson Heights, of course, my 1990 GEO overheated and stalled out in unbelievably stop-and-go, snail-paced traffic. Then a passing Caddy stopped alongside, the window rolled down, and a lovely, black female arm miraculously extended a plastic gallon of water to me. My newsstand owner then exclaimed that he had been an auto mechanic in India and “Not to Worry!” And, indeed, after a brief rest and some work under the hood, we were back on the road. After leaving them off on Main Street in Flushing, I had a comparatively smooth ride home.

The next day I was determined to open for business as usual. The shop was filled all day with frightened young people. Williamsburg then was a haven for wealthy trust fund babies and poor artists pushed out by rents across the water in the gentrifying East Village. I sold one pair of earrings for $12 all day. That was all right because September 12, 2001, was a day to be together to start to feel safe again.

ROBERT: In the days, weeks, years after ‘9/11’, four things still stick in my mind: First, the names with personal detail and photographs, affixed in the thousands to every fence and empty wall in downtown Manhattan. Second, the sea of dirty-white dust of ‘cremains’ that blanketed cars, trees and streets when the prevailing winds blew towards Queens. Third, the dazed, sad look on the face of my friend, a Fire Department Lieutenant, who was on the fourth floor with his men when the North Tower fell, as he told how he’d been dug out of the rubble like a rare artifact. Fourth, the resigned-hopeful face of the young NYPD detective who’d done 12-hour tours, six- days-a-week for months at the Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island (Had a site ever been more aptly named?) His job and that of his brother-detectives: to rake through thousands, tens of thousands, of tons of debris from ‘ground zero’ in search of human remains. They told him to wear a mask. What they didn’t tell him? That in 2004, when I met him, he’d be forever unfit for duty, unable to run or climb without gasping for breath, unlikely to see his children get much older.

Oh, yes, lest I forget: If Mayor Rudy Giuliani and Thomas Von Essen, his handpicked Fire Commissioner, had been delivered into the hands of the rank-and-file of the New York City Fire Department after 9/11, I suspect the ‘Mayor of America’ would have been hard-pressed to explain why the Fire Department’s radios failed to deliver the message to vacate the Towers while the Police Department’s radios worked fine – especially, since the City had known, since the prior bombing of the WTC in 1973, that the FD radios were defective… Just a thought.

Robert Knightly