If the Mob Murdered Kennedy...

Handsome Johnny, Assassination maestro?

A huge portion of the U.S. population believes in the conspiracy theory that the mob bumped off Kennedy in retaliation for little brother RFK playing attack dog on organized crime in his role as Attorney General within brother Jack's administration.  According to recent polls, more people believe the mob was involved than the "official report" generated by the heavily flawed Warren Commission report.

For those who are well-versed in the 20th century history and machinations of the mafia in America, the name Johnny Rosselli must come to mind; he was the guy who made things happen. He was counted on to execute the most difficult, profitable and important operations, whether it be taking over the Hollywood Unions, infiltrating the gambling industry in Las Vegas, or coordinating ex CIA spooks to battle Castro in Cuba.  If it was a high-degree-of-difficulty operation, Rosselli was involved. Period. The fact that he was a major player in nearly every major mob op in the 20th Century is a testament to his low-profile, elusive ways. Rosselli was a proverbial ghost, floating almost imperceptibly in, and then out, of the biggest crime scenes in American history, dealing with the major players not only in organized crime and business, but in government, and at the very highest levels.

So, if you buy into the mob-JFK assassination conspiracy, and you have a competent mafia IQ, then you have to assume that Rosselli was involved.  Finding Rosselli footprints on a crime scene proved to be a 50-year challenge for the FBI, but the quintessential Rosselli biography, The All-American Mafioso, has two sources, albeit shaky sources, that not only place him at the scene of the assination, but has him front and center.  If the mob killed Kennedy, here is how it was done. An Excerpt from The Johnny Rosselli Story.

There are even accounts that place Rosselli at the scene of the assassination. Jimmy Starr, the Hollywood gossip columnist and a friend of Rosselli's, raised the prospect in passing during an interview with one of the authors. "What I heard about the Kennedy assassination was that Johnny was  the guy who got the team together to do the hit."  Starr said the scenario was "fairly well known" in the underworld but was reluctant to go into detail.  "I don't remember where I got that -- I think it was from a couple of mob guys back East.  I wasn't back there, so I had no reason to follow it up."

A similar but more detailed version was put forward by Robert Russell, a convicted felon who detailed his allegations in pro per filings in federal court. Russell's story rambles over thirty-seven pages and and seems to draw heavily on the volumes of available assassination research. But what seems to be the crux of his discourse is a chance meeting with a woman named "Cindy," not further identified, who said she worked for Jack Ruby and had assisted in the Kennedy shooting.

"Cindy" told Russell that the day of the assassination, she had driven Johnny Rosselli and a second man, a sharpshooter from Miami, to the grassy knoll at the far end of Dealey Plaza.  When the President's motorcade approached, the sniper fired two shots, handed his rifle to Rosselli, and walked down the slope to lose himself in the crowd. Cindy then drove Rosselli and the rifle from the scene.  It seems auspicious that Russell would place Rosselli in Dallas on November 22; the FBI surveillance of Rosselli loses his trail on the West Coast between November 19 and November 27.

These reports are fragmentary and inconclusive, but taken together, they lend weight to Rosselli's later contention that he knew what had happened in Dallas.  Together, with his direct experience in the CIA plots against Castro, Rosselli held the key to secrets that would haunt the nation, guilty knowledge that would betray America's faith in itself. 

Excerpted from
All-American Mafioso
The Johnny Rosselli Story
Doubleday Books

Veering Toward Rollerball

Bullies are Back in Town

This was not such a good week for the NHL, though you would never know it based on the response from both the league and their biggest broadcast rightsholder to this potential crisis.  On Wednesday the Colorado Avalanche's starting goalie Semyon Varlamov turned himself in to the Denver authorities for Domestic abuse and kidnapping.  The Avs truculent first year coach Patrick Roy gave a smiling press conference on Thursday saying he wished he knew more, and Friday he  announced he was starting Varlamov who was out on bail because, well, "Why Wait?"
"We're all aware of what happened, but we just feel that he's our guy. We have confidence in him and feel that it's good for him to play tonight."
Varlamov time line: jailed on Wednesday, bailed on Thursday, between the pipes on Friday.  

That same night, the latest version of the Philadelphia Flyers Broad Street Bullies found themselves trailing by a touchdown (7-0) in their game versus the Washington Capitals.  With fans in Philly's Wells Fargo Center loudly chanting for the firing of General Manager Paul Holmgren, the Flyers, who had been dormant all night, finally decided to change the course of events.  They staged a massive brawl that would have made their predecessors Hammer, Hound Dog and Hound Dog all proud.

The "highlight" was when goalie Ray Emery skated the length of the ice to bludgeon his Caps counterpart Braden Holtby, a clearly unwilling combatant. In an eery coincidence, this was all too reminiscent of Roy's two classic brawls with Detroit goalies Mike Vernon (decisive loss) and the rematch with Chris Osgood (decisive win over unwilling combatant) from the late 1990's. One of Friday's casualties was Flyers forward Steve Downie hospitalized for two days and counting with either a concussion, a broken orbital bone, a facial laceration or any combination thereof.  The Flyer fans, not coincidentally, stopped booing and gave their club a standing ovation.  Emery, who was lit up for 7 goals, was given the game's third star of the night. The NHL chose to hand out no suspensions, despite the fact that unwilling combatants were getting beaten senseless.

The referees failure to protect its players was the primary beef of
Hockey Hall of Fame sportswriter Kevin Paul Dupont.  He immediately took to Twitter to point out the obvious, that the NHL had achieved yet another black eye. When it comes to fighting, I am in the same camp of "Doves," (as opposed to "Hawks") feeling that such gratuitous cartoon violence places hockey in the sports netherworld alongside the WWE and MMA. Dupont spent the rest of Friday night and most of Saturday morning defending his logic and the fact that he never played pro hockey in 140 character bursts.

TV demigod Pat Sajak even weighed in:

Pat Sajak        ✔ @patsajak

Love hockey, but Flyers are part of reason it remains a niche sport. Shameful 

tonight (including Philly radio team.)

He, too, was besieged by angry fans.  So as Saturday night rolled in, I made it a point to tune into Hockey Night in Canada to make sense of it all.  I figured Don Cherry would take the "Hawk" position in his Coach's Corner segment, and the serious analysts would condemn the Clockwork Orange style violence in the second intermission.  Both segments have plenty of time, both were vastly disappointing.  It's official, hockey's greatest media force, Hockey Night in Canada, has fully abandoned even a pretense of journalism.  Cherry was the only person to mention the incident at all, in his final thoughts of an 8 minute segment, essentially applauding the Flyers. "They went down fighting, might do em some good... the fans were cheering."

Canadian Hockey TV Icons MacLean (L) and Cherry (R)

The next intermission with a panel including intrepid reporter Elliott Friedman, and thinking men former goalies Glenn Healy and Kevin Weekes never touched it.  Weekes and the oft-cartoonish P.J. Stock got out of their chairs to stage a lengthy justification of skates accidentally severing achilles tendons in corner collisions.  The showcase game between Toronto and Vancouver had become particularly nasty, and the entire panel all made a point of applauding the normally passive Toronto goal scorer Phil Kessel for "dropping his mitts" to fight the Canucks Alex Burrows. Not a word on the Flyers Wrestlemania.  Hawks defeat Doves, unanimously.

Oh, wait, there was a HNIC "reporter" in Denver, giving an exclusive interview with Patrick Roy.  Perhaps this was the opportunity for some real questions re the Affaire de' Varlamov.  Not a word. This nameless talking head (I'm sorry, I simply can't call him a reporter) merely teed up a couple of opportunities for Roy to explain why his team is doing so well, and the only conclusion we could draw is that it was because of good coaching (discipline and playing hard).

Some of the year's biggest news, the biggest story taking place within the past 24 hours, went virtually ignored by the media giant of hockey.  The fact that CBC's contract with the NHL expires at the end of the season has to be taken into account.  For the foreseeable future, you are going to have to get your journalism in 140 character chunks.