Samuel Mendez

Per. 1

6/14/08

Who Killed JFK and Why?

The assassination of John F. Kennedy happened at approximately 12:30 P.M. on Friday,

November 22, 1963 in Dallas, Texas. President Kennedy was on a 1961 Lincoln Continental

limousine in a motorcade headed to the Dallas Business and Trade Mart where he was to deliver

a speech and have lunch with various Dallas leaders. As the limousine progressed through Elm

Street, shots where fired at the limousine where the president was located. According to several

witnesses, three shots where fired: the first bullet missed the limousine altogether, the second

bullet passed Kennedy through the back and exited through his throat and then hit Governor John

Connally and the third, and final, bullet hit the right side of President Kennedy’s head, fatally

wounding him. Half an hour later, he was declared dead.

Who killed President John Fitzgerald Kennedy and for what reasons? What could

someone have against him that he had to be assassinated in front of so many citizens? These

questions, along with multiple others concerning the assassination of Kennedy, have baffled

many for decades. Some say it was Lee Harvey Oswald, the only one ever accused of

assassinating Kennedy, and he did it by himself and for his own personal reasons. But, did he

really act alone and for no particular reason? Was he even involved in the first place? Multiple

sources containing decades of information reveal that Oswald, in fact, did not assassinate

President Kennedy, a conspiracy involving a group that despised Kennedy and who had the

power to pull an assassination did: the Mafia.

The main reason why the Mafia wanted to eliminate President Kennedy was because he

had double-crossed them. Joseph Kennedy, John F. Kennedy’s father, had been a bootlegger

during prohibition and with his distribution of illegal alcohol he formed connections with the

Mafia. By utilizing his connections, Joseph Kennedy was able to get the Mafia to help out in his

son’s political ambitions. When John F. Kennedy ran for presidential election in 1960, he was

aided by various mobsters, like Sam Giancana from Chicago, who helped fix the election returns

in that city so that Kennedy could obtain Illinois’ electoral votes. Once Kennedy defeated

Richard Nixon and became president of the United States, he appointed his younger brother,

Robert F. Kennedy, attorney general. As attorney general, Bobby Kennedy began to pursue

organized crime and the Mafia by setting up the Organize Crime task Force at the Justice

Department. The pressure and the consistent FBI surveillance that Bobby Kennedy implied on

the Mafia angered them, and they began considering the elimination of the Kennedy brothers for

their double-crossing.

Not only had the mob aided in John F. Kennedy’s election, but they had also cooperated

with the CIA to plan an assassination of Fidel Castro, one of the mob leaders involved in the CIA

plot to kill Castro being none other that Sam Giancana. Fidel Castro had barred several mobsters

who owned legal casinos in Cuba, (Castro calling them quote, “undesirable aliens”), including a

big time mobster named Santo Trafficante Jr., who had also agreed to help the CIA with their

plot. John and Bobby Kennedy knew about the CIA utilizing mobsters to eliminate Castro, but

when the Bay of Pigs invasion failed miserably and the plans to assassinate Castro by utilizing

mobsters were called off, Bobby Kennedy began his pursuit against the mob and mob leaders,

which angered the Mafia, for they had not only reportedly helped JFK win the presidential

election, but had agreed to help eliminate Castro. Since the mob had lost important casinos in

Cuba because of Castro, they also felt as if Kennedy was double-crossing them by not trying a

second blow at eliminating Castro.

The pursuit of organized crime by Bobby Kennedy brought charges on Jimmy Hoffa and

Carlos Marcello, both of whom had also reportedly worked with the CIA and their Castro

assassination plot. Bobby Kennedy pressed charges against Hoffa and had Marcello deported to

Guatemala. Both then threaten to assassinate President Kennedy for being involved in Bobby

Kennedy’s war against organized crime, since they believed that they would strike a bigger blow

against the Kennedys since the President had more power than Bobby.

Kennedy’s double-crossing of the Mafia, Bobby Kennedy’s war against organized crime

and their leaders both tie up and point to the Mafia as being behind the assassination of Kennedy.

Let’s face it; they had the power and the resources to pull this assassination off. But where does

the “whodunit” fit into all this? The answer is James Files, a double agent who worked for both

the CIA and the Mafia. With Johnny Roselli and Charles Nicoletti, who where Sam Giancana’s

(again Giancana, Kennedy’s aid in elections, and one of the CIA’s cooperators!) hit men, he

became part of the assassination team and he claims that he was the gunman on the grassy knoll,

(which is a location by Elm Street where most people present during the assassination of

Kennedy say that the final bullet that struck Kennedy came from). Files’ ties with the CIA also

led him to know about Oswald and how he how he was a supposed Castro admirer, a Marxist,

and how he had been to various places including the Soviet Union in the years prior to the

assassination of Kennedy. He reportedly spent time with Oswald in the days prior to the

assassination of Kennedy, for Oswald had been contracted by Nicoletti as a “controller”.

Oswald’s polemical events prior to the assassination made him an easy target for the Mafia to

frame, for in blaming Oswald, Cuba would be blamed, the CIA would be blamed, and basically

any other thing to which Oswald was connected to would be blamed. Knowing that Oswald

might speak, he was killed by Jack Ruby, a nightclub owner from Dallas, Texas who also had

ties to the Mafia. Jack Ruby, in the days before the assassination, made numerous calls to mob

leaders all over the country, for he was their man in Dallas. Once the assassination had taken

place, Ruby was then led into the Dallas P.D., for the Mafia also had their influence on the

Police, no doubt, and assassinated Oswald before he was able to speak. Ruby acted as a hit man,

carrying out the final stage of the plot.

The Mafia, with its power, its influence on politicians and in the White House,

and its anger at the supposed double-crossing of the Kennedy brothers, were the only group

capable of pulling the assassination of Kennedy. They had the people, the weapons, all to pull off

a crime in which they knew that other groups would be blamed for. Lee Harvey Oswald for them

was a tool, a scapegoat, which they could use to blame everything, for his almost notorious

agenda before the assassination made him look like a conspirator, send from outside the country

to kill a President Kennedy who was ahead of his time and the enemy of communism, when in

reality he was killed for messing with the wrong crowd.

Works Cited

Artiu. "The JFK Assassination: Mafia Theory." 1 Feb. 2001. <http://everything2.com/index.pl?

node_id=939695>.

Cardinale, Krysta. "Mafia and John F. Kennedy." Encyclomedia.

<http://www.encyclomedia.com/mafia_john_f_kennedy.html>.

Magnuson, Ed. "The Assassination: Did the Mob Kill JFK?" 21 June 2007.

<http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,956397-1,00.html>.

Oglesby, Carl. "Who Killed JFK?" 1992.

<http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/Who_Killed_JFK.html>.

"JFK Murder Solved." 2003. <http://www.jfkmurdersolved.com/jfkwhy.htm>.

"Kennedy Assassination Conspiracy Theories." Wikipedia.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kennedy_assassination_theories>.