Vince Flaherty was raised in Southern California. His father was a syndicated columnist and a speech writer for Senator John F. Kennedy. He has maintained successful businesses in the motion picture and real estate industry. He is a hands-on expert in labor relations relating to entertainment, real estate and construction. He worked as an aide to Congressman Charles Wilson (R) and former Governor. Pat Brown (D). He is a past councilmember of the Pacific Palisades Community Council. He was the driver for California State Treasurer Kathleen Brown during her campaign for governor. In recent years, he has contributed his efforts to the elections of Republican, Democratic and Independent candidates.
He consistently donates his efforts toward helping young people, and whenever he has the chance to speak to school students, he jumps on it. He is a long time supporter of the Santa Monica Boys and Girls Club and an Assistant Scoutmaster of Boy Scout Troop 223 in Pacific Palisades. He lectures in the Los Angeles Unified School District in his capacity as an authority on California History. He is also regarded for his efforts with youth athletics, and was awarded a resolution of the highest commendation from the Board of Supervisors of the County of Los Angeles for his outstanding service in representing the people, by guiding the Westside Bruins Youth Football Team to victory at the National Championship Finals. But the vocation he enjoys most is his one as a husband, and father of two sons
Financial, corporate, military and other interests hijacked our government a long time ago. The majority of our legislators have either ignored conflicts of interest, or been more directly involved. Vince seeks to change our American government that has shown itself to be a government for the corporation, into a government for the people. He is looking forward to seeing the Citizens United decision overruled. He is an environmentalist committed to phasing out dependence upon foreign oil and nuclear energy. But he is aware Montana and North Dakota contain eight times more oil than Saudi Arabia and that this information has been kept from the public. He is aware that foreign oil interests are indirectly funding certain misguided groups to prevent drilling for American oil. He believes that Publicly Funded Elections are now necessary to keep the spark of Democracy alive. He is not afraid to break up the big banks into more manageable pieces, instill trust in the free market, reduce the deficit and restore the California economy by providing relief to taxpayers without cutting education or damaging transportation and trade. There doesn't appear to be anyone else in office who is at liberty to do that today. Yet he is chagrined by knowing what to do, while many people continue to place their trust in the same old tunnel-vision political-machine politicians. That's why Vince is so committed. That's why he is obligated.
PERSONAL DETAILS
by Vince Flaherty
Forward
The following are excerpts from Personal Details, a book about how current events obligated me to try and make a contribution toward our future. It shares info that some will not want to hear. The thinking in speaking about these negative things, is that if my campaign catches fire, my adversaries might use this information against me. So it is better to get it out now, so that people are not misled.
A second reason, for speaking out is to correct the misperception that I chose my direction in life because I wanted to be famous, when I was really after making enough money to become elected without becoming beholden to others. A third reason for speaking out, is to correct a misperception based upon the people I know, that I must be a disciple of the establishment. People don't like what they don't understand, and there are a good number of people whose reliance on the fairness of government has turned into hate. Laurel Canyon where I lived, for instance, is home to children of the Hollywood artists and writers who were persecuted during the McCarthy inquisition, and the feelings there of government mistrust still run deep.
Sadly, most all of the hits recorded by this website's stat counters are upon the sensational topics, the underworld, the assassinations, the loosely knit organizations that control the world's visible governments, and other topics more suitable for the tabloid press. Most people never click on the ISSUES tab, or read my instructions on How to put a stop to the California and worldwide economic crisis. Most of us are weary of hearing about the problems we are forced to confront, and inherently interested in becoming entertained instead. We are all susceptible to becoming excited by "us against them" rhetoric. However there is a profound difference between realizing a discomforting reality, and actually admitting it exists. For that reason, I've deleted much of this book, Personal Details, in favor of relating the more attention-getting topics.
But when my campaign picks up enough traction, I'm going to delete the all negative, sensational and controversial information I've been using to attract attention. Although for now, it is hoped that by presenting a complex insight, I may gain your trust. Meanwhile, my last campaign has reinforced the lesson we have always known; that the system is set up to silence candidates like myself in favor of the paid-for politicians of the status quo, and nothing short of publicly funded elections, comprehensive election reform, or contribitions to my campaign of your hard earned cash, can ever change that.
Since the bizarre Citizens United Supreme Court ruling allowing unlimited campaign contributions from corporations, the cost of buying airtime has tripled, enabling well funded establishment machine candidates to gain further recognition over proper candidates of the people. These establishment politicians may have built very good track records for assisting the local community, or fighting for human rights. They may even claim they are going to create jobs out of thin air. However when it comes down to the most fundamental issues undermining fair commerce, free market finance, and democracy, no matter what they say, they will always vote with the powers that put them and keep them in office. They can afford slick public relations experts to make it seem as though they have nice plans for correcting the economy. But trust me; the favored candidates do not have very good plans at all.
Listen to me. I know what to do. I understand how to genuinely halt the housing crisis, restore trust in the financial system, disincentivize the games that crony capitalists are playing with California water and energy, reduce taxes, and turn the economy of California and its neighbors around fairly quickly. My friends and I can take other legislators aside and show them what needs to be done, if you will assist me in taking a seat in the legislature. By the way, there is a lot of talk without very much thought, about voting out the incumbents. But it is ludicrous to think that compromised politicians can be just be "voted out", because the only other choices on the ballot with any significant name recognition are going to be candidates groomed by the masters of those same incumbent politicians.
You can help me greatly by donating your time, or money, to help me reach more people. I can earn the vote with a fraction of the advertising support of the establishment's politicians because I'm straightforward, and my solutions are real. Contact me right now. Speak with me. Hold a get together at your home. Invite me to speak with your friends. Consider signing my petition for Publicly Funded Elections, which is the only sure way to take governance out of the hands of corporations and banks. Contribute a little of your time. Go over to my Campaign Fundraising Sale page and buy something there, or drop me a message and let me know that you would like to assist in another way. If you wish to help but do not see how you could, just contact me. If you care about preserving Liberty, you should act now.
For the time being, I intend to keep updating this website with information about the unlawful activities of incumbents, and their masters, until some of them decide to join me in my effort to work out sorely needed reform. I don't prefer this approach, because this is not the time to reveal officials as extortionists, perverts or traitors, even as they are deceiving their constituents that they are not. I would prefer instead to stay on track about what I can do to fix this economic and moral mess we are in. I've spoken with many California elected officials, many of whom are more educated about how to tactfully deal with others, but those conversations have made me even more certain that if I'm elected, I will be one of the few that recognize the steps that must be taken.
So keep checking back with me on this website. It is either going to expose more names and connections to today's wrongdoers, and continue attracting attention to controversial items from the past, or it is going to leave those things behind and change into a professional layout, a more simple, branded style of campaign, with buttons that you can click to interact... in which case you will know that we have met our cash requirements, and will be staying on the high road where real solutions can be implemented, and it will not be long before you start seeing the California you thought you used to know.
I am a reformist. The worst thing I can do, is vote no when it comes down to wastefully perpetuating the lifestyles of the so-called elite, or squandering the economy of California and the future of our children, in the mistaken belief that further taxation and suffering is necessary to safeguard the well being of the financial, corporate, military and government machine. Not only am I prepared to vote against my friends if they are wrong, but I am prepared to get their attention, one by one, and show them why they will have to do what is right.
Vince Flaherty
May 5, 2010
READ WHY VINCE FLAHERTY IS UNIQUELY QUALIFIED TO REFORM THE SYSTEM
Focus lost on how and why America once made success possible for millions
This photo is of 13 scripts, and 40 treatments for the TV/internet interactive series called AMERICA. Also in the photo is the old Wollensak tape recorder Vince carried for his father Vincent X. when they went to record President Eisenhower's contribution at his ranch in Gettysburg. Yes, this show was pitched around Hollywood for a long time, and the studios thought it was a little too corny back then. But when it was passed around in 2009 the timing was right. It was received with enthusiasm, and more eyes ended up looking at the AMERICA script than contemplated. There was little surprise when, after the script was submitted to the History Channel's parent studio, they soon came out with a similar version. Much of the History Channel's show was identical, but it lacked the substantive focus on why America made personal success possible for millions of diverse Americans. Disappointingly, the History Channel's one dimensional series only appeared to portray Americans as succeeding simply because there was something inherently special about them.
These are a few of the tapes that my Pop went through a lot of trouble to record with famous Americans like Jimmy Stewart and Martin Luther King Jr. Each individual was given the same 20 questions to answer, not only about how they achieved personal success in America, but WHY they did. A few extra questions were targeted at each person's own experience.
Each segment in this unprecedented series deals with the major points in each famous person's life that led them to success - backed up by the never-before-heard interviews recorded, with people such as John Wayne and John Steinbeck. I mention Wayne and Steinbeck, to emphasize that the focus of this show does not fall into the trap of promoting one political ideology versus another. It deals with personal success more than monetary success. It gives insight to not only how America can help people to succeed, but to how people can help themselves.
Trillions in taxpayer stimulus money wastefully administered
The trillions of dollars in TARP and Stimulus money, created out of thin air by the so-called Federal Reserve, was certainly necessary theoretically. But it was wastefully administered. Too much of it has gone into preserving the corrupt powers of the status quo, in comparison to what a great thing it would have been for the U.S. government to stand behind the bogus Triple A mortgage securities the central bank members sold to unwitting secondry market investors around the world. What a great thing it could have been if the U.S. government had thereby restored international trust in that secondary marketplace, instead of playing favored nations with the TARP and Stimulus money, and trading in advance of the information. What a great thing it would have been to find ways to assist the credit-starved small businesses that are the true backbone of America. What a great thing it would have been if the corrupted administrators of the TARP and Stimulus had also looked at meaningful ways to backstop regional economics, and what a great thing it would have been, for instance, here in California, and hence for the country, to see one or two major movie studios humming once again, telling a story that is real for a change, like Vince Flaherty's AMERICA, instead of supremacist propaganda. A lot of folks make generalized statements about taking the country back. But one part of the solution to the economic crisis in California, and hence the States of this country, still lies in taking the media and Hollywood back.
Right now, the studios are as posting record box-office gains, indicating they don't need any kind of help. But those positive numbers, like the positive numbers generated by the banks and corporations running the world into the ground, have been somehow generated despite massive blue collar unemployment, record numbers of families dispossesed from their homes, guilds and trade unions broken, continued cost of living hikes, and needless squandering of federal taxpayer dollars into growing bureaucracies. Most Californians have a lot less spendable cash these days, and that's one reason why California's movie studios are presently operating at 38% of capacity.
Looks down upon sound stages
Vince Flaherty stood on the 16th floor of the Wasserman building with one of his friends at Universal, and he looked down on all the closed sound stages...
"What are you doing on the lot?", he asked.
"The Jay Leno Show."
"The Jay Leno Show? You have this huge back lot with all these stages and resources sitting here, and all that is going on is one lousy TV show...? I realize it is the end of the year when things at the studios are traditionally slow, but I have never seen it so dead," he said.
"But we will lease you these stages," Vince's friend told him, "if you produce your show AMERICA here."
Vince thought to himself, "Why the hell would anybody want to make a picture here, in California, a place with the highest sales taxes in the nation, and the most oppressive laws against labor and transportation".
But he kept that to himself, and instead responded:
"You could be a big help in getting pictures like mine made here, if you'll assist me in lobbying the legislature to reduce taxes on California film production... reduce the taxes down to below, or at least down to what we would have to pay in any other state. California needs to be turned into into a lower tax state, to attract commerce and finance from all over the world."
"Vince, you're not going to be able to change the machine."
"What machine?"
"You're barking up the wrong tree," he said. "You'll never change the way it works."
Not "soft on Socialism..."
Now Vince does not generally agree with the dogmatic thinking that abounded during the Cold War which resulted in accusations against people whose own thinking opened them up to be regarded as "soft on socialism". He does not view himself as a capitalist in the way it has become increasingly envisioned, as a ruthless kind of bank and corporate totalitarianism. Nor is he one to advocate that the controlling powers behind the world's visible governments ought to further manipulate the power of the state into micro-managing private industry for their own ends. In today's climate, there is plenty of pessimism about the future of Democracy and Liberty in America. There is a plethora of two party political, economic, due process, and private property problems, that the legislature and the administration appear to be utterly incapable of grasping, let alone solving.
So as Vince looked down upon the closed sound stages, he couldn't help but wonder just how "private" Universal's relationship with their former parent GE or the new partner Comcast could be. And since it was politicians that facilitated the world economic quagmire for the powers that be, and since the California legislature can't fight its way out of a paper bag in the first place, he thought that maybe he ought to ask someone back in Washington D.C. if there was a way to get President Obama's administration to do something... like give their unnofficial approval to a wholesome project such as AMERICA, because after all, just like the rest of corporate monopoly America, Hollywood really needs to open up a win-win business relationship with the smaller production companies, and their artists, for its own good.
But Hollywood isn't the same as it used to be when there were laws that prevented large entertainment agencies from packaging all aspects of motion pictures they produced themselves. Now, Ari Emanuel, for instance, the brother of former Chief of Staff and Mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel, controls the most powerful entertainment agency in the world, WME, since his Chicago company Endeavor Entertainment absorbed the William Morris Agency, and now, like the large banks that circumvented regulations intended to keep them from packaging and selling mortgage backed securites that they originate themselves, the handful of other largest entertainment agencies enjoy a similar industry wide monopoly of trade.
Calls former Chief of Staff
So Vince called the former Chief of Staff from the cabinet of a past President of the United States, who is now the senior partner in a Washington D.C. law firm that specializes in lobbying. Vince told him what he was trying to do. He even mentioned the name of his friend at the studio. But he was quickly advised that there are laws against the government funding propaganda. He was advised that the administration would not be inclined to bail out the studios.
Vince tried to convey that his proposed series AMERICA is not propaganda per se, nor are the studios looking for bailout funds. But simply speaking, AMERICA, because of its scope, could book most all the A list talent in Hollywood and get the studios humming again - help to get the broader economy of L.A. cranking. He mentioned that the brother of President Obama's former Chief of Staff, through a reverse merger, had recently become the president of the largest entertainment agency in the world, WME, and that WME packaged the latest Michael Moore film. Vince made the point that WME would be a natural for AMERICA, because an agency representing a client like Moore, who is of a contrarian viewpoint to corporate media, could be hardly be accused of fomenting propaganda.
Vince went on to emphasize that the focus of this show does not fall into the trap of promoting one political ideology versus another. It deals with personal success. It gives insight to not only how America can help people, but to how people can help themselves to succeed. But apparently, Vince's argument was not as compelling as it needed to be, for with that, the former Chief of Staff asked to be forgiven. He simply couldn't talk further because he had a Marine Corps Colonel coming to dinner.
Vince suddenly had the inescapable feeling of one who might be a bit over his head. He had the feeling that he had been fortunate enough to have even had the conversation in the first place. The next day Vince's friend from Universal called, and caught him off guard. He was annoyed, almost as if he knew Vince had recommended his studio to the former Chief of Protocol. He told Vince, in no uncertain terms, that this whole idea he had for AMERICA was just a non starter.
"B...B...But it would be good for the country", Vince started to stammer, and then quickly collected himself, lowered his voice, and followed up with, "There are so many people who have worked hard, and done everything right, and they are having the rug pulled out from under them by the government and their masters in the central bank. Many of these people have lost their retirement, or their homes, and they are giving up on the American dream. They really need to learn why others were able to become successful in America. The people need to know it is possible."
"Well, maybe so," said his friend in an even lower voice, "but if you ever do find a way to pitch this show at WME, you will just be wasting everybody's time."
Thereafter, Vince sat in the office of a big shot at Paramount Pictures, and again pitched his sorely needed project AMERICA. And do you know what he was told?
"You're not going to be able to educate people," said the executive. "You will never get stars like Brad Pitt to do the show."
"But all the stars will want to be a part of this, Vince explained. "While many of them have long term commitments, the one week format makes availability possible."
"Look," said the executive, "the corporations that own the studios are heavily invested in the status quo, and will see no need to try something new. It may be true that we are all on perilous economic footing, and that people sorely need a show like this, but nobody in Hollywood is going to admit it."
Thanksgiving day always reminds us of the obstacles our forefathers confronted, and the courage that made California, and America a great place to live. On this particular Thanksgiving day, there are many people who for one reason or another, do not have families, or homes, or who will not be able to join their families for a traditional Thanksgiving. I hope that we can all take, as I do, comfort and encouragement from our achievements of the past, and in that regard I'd like to say something about my own family, and my grandfather, the Old Centerfielder.
My great grandfather Patrick O'Flaherty was born in 1822. He and his brothers came to America to escape tyranny in Ireland. He worked as a laborer until he had enough money to by a horse and wagon, and become a Teamster.
My great grandmother Bridget Murphy, Galway, Ireland, immigrated to the United States during the period of genocide euphemistically perceived as the Irish potato famine. She settled in St. Louis, Missouri where she met Patrick O'Flaherty. They married after a short courtship. The O'Flahertys had five children; one daughter, Josie, a schoolteacher, died.
John, on top in the photo, and Pat on the right were early baseball players who found careers in law enforcement. James J. O'Flaherty on the bottom, was known as Riverfront Jack because he shot a bunch of bad guys on the St. Louis waterfront. My grandfather Mike, on the left, "The Old Centerfielder", was the youngest of his siblings.
Not long after that photo was taken, Mike and his brother Jim, aka Riverfront Jack, moved to Washington D.C. where Thomas O. Flaherty, of Oxen Hill, had arranged jobs for them with the government. Jim joined the Secret Service, and Mike joined the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, where worked all his life, as a printer. He liked to say he made more money than Rockefeller although he just couldn't keep it. But the truth was that his salary was barely enough to raise his family, and provided no savings to send any of them to college.
When he was very old, and living alone, he was the last white person in the neighborhood, as the central District of Columbia, the area all around the White House had become a ghetto, inhabited by former slaves and the children of slaves. Some in our family were worried about him living there all alone. They tried to get him to move, but he wouldn't hear of it. He had raised his family in the house, and that was where he was going to stay.
Regarding the Negroes, as black people were called then, he said he got along fine with his neighbors, and he reminded his proud sons and daughter that some of our O'Flaherty clan had lived and died in slavery themselves, well into the 19th century, on British plantations in the Bahamas. In as few words, The Old Centerfielder educated his adult sons and daughter that the neighborhood was much the same as it had been when they grew up, with people still trying to make the best of times out of the worst of times. Nevertheless, one evening when he was about 96 years old, the family got him out to a Thanksgiving dinner at old Tom O'Donnel's restaurant, and while they were there, everything he owned was moved into a place closer to them in Maryland.
This old daguerreotype photo is of my grandmother on my father's side, Mary Rosella Lacey, or Mom Mom, who died before I was born. She is wearing a dress she made herself. Her father, John Lacey, was an Irish bootmaker who made boots for President Lincoln, among other people. She is notable for raising five Flaherty children who all turned out well, and that is what defines her life for me.
One day I learned that although my family's ancestors, O'Malley, O'Higgins, Murphy, and Lynch, all had Irish names, I was not entirely one hundred percent Irish, like I thought. The O'Flaherty's had in large part kept to themselves overlooking the pre-historic sea port now called Galway, from the Connemara Mountains of northwest Ireland, an area never surrendered to anyone. But inevitably, around the year 1,000 our blood became mixed with the Norman family Burke. During the Dark Ages it is rather unabashedly written, as though it were not blarney, that some of us removed further from Connemara into the monasteries of northern Scotland, where we kept alive the written word, by reproducing the only remaining copies of Brehon Law, the Bible and other sacred texts.
Recently, I read somewhere on the internet, maybe on Wikipedia, that the Dark Ages was a misnomer, and overrated as far as the amount of repression and ignorance perpetrated upon the people of the world. I wonder if someday they won't deny that the northern hemisphere entered another dark ages with the measures implemented after the covered up secondary market collapse of 2007. Anyway, they say so-called modern scholars tend to avoid using the phrase Dark Ages these days.
And well, if that is right, then I suppose my ancestors were wrong to have gone off, as they did, to those monasteries, and to have copied all those books. But that would not be the first time that a group of people went off and did something that they thought was the right thing to do...
Once in America, it took the marriage of my grandfather, to unite my O'Flaherty group with another descendant of a Norman and Irish family, a merchant named John J. Lacey, and his wife Rose Ella Wilson, the daughter of a Dutch and English banker named William Wilson. My grandmother Mom Mom's mother, who they called Nana, was a Wilson.
A great grandmother's letters shine new light upon the Lincoln conspiracy
Nana was a nice, well educated young lady, from an established family. Her paternal great grandfather once owned farmland on what is now called Capitol Hill, and her great-great grandfather on her mother's side had served on the Revolutionary War staff of General Washington. But according to her letters, that pedigree did not necessarily make Nana think her side of the family was better than the generations who had lost the land before them. The negative thing however, was that the once prosperous Wilsons had become beset by the severe financial contraction that resulted in the banking collapse of 1857. There were also a few footnotes to her side of the family history that no one spoke about.
Nana's best friend had once started telling everyone what she knew, and they had locked her away for life in the Government Hospital for the Insane. No one wanted to dwell for long on the fighting amongst themselves and the suffering that had created the differences between them. Neither did the family speak about the subject when my father's aunt Katy used to bring it up, for she was regarded as the conspiracy theorist of his generation. Nevertheless, Katy preserved some of the papers that my great grandmother, Mary Rosella Wilson, or Nana, left behind, and those writings in my collection, as well as letters that have been saved by the James R. Dobbyn family, and Frances Flaherty Knox, mention the negative forces and those responsible for the financial pressure that caused our family differences. And no family fight has ever drawn as much attention. Let's be frank about it, and call it what it was. I'm talking about the Civil War.
It was a war fought over the interpretation of the sovereign rights of individual states; a Civil War for state's rights; the individual rights of sovereign states to protect, and defend if necessary, their laws, their enterprises, and their citizens from external powers such as the federal government and its domination by international banks. Nana wrote that detractors used our family fight, this Civil War of ours, to prophesize the failure of our new form of government. They mistook the reasons why we were fighting amongst each other, and they questioned what we were fighting about. They dramatized the incendiary racial, moral and financial aspects surrounding the issue of slavery. They ridiculed our chances for survival as a nation. They said we were dreaming.
Some people thought we were simply fighting about the abolition of slavery. Others insisted it was a rebellion against federal taxation. Many never knew the Civil War was fought in the aftermath of the greatest financial collapse in the history of the United States, that had wiped out most of the banks, frozen credit, and left people starving on the streeets of America's cities. None of them, could conceive how the sons and daughters of the original thirteen colonies could fight each other over the principle of state's rights that detractors of democracy never knew. They could not comprehend any cause that would make brother take sides against brother, or fathers and sons occupy different positions on the field of battle. They never learned that family fights are not fought to destroy the other side, but instead to compel the other side to be loyal and true.
Nana said slavery would have been abolished without the need of a Civil War, and the timing of the Emancipation Proclamation had been a strategic thing. She said our family fight, this Civil War of ours, really started as an economic conflict forced upon the States, who sought to defend their independence, and the sovereign constitutional rights of their states, from the tyranny of a federal government ultimately motivated by private banking interests. She said the sovereign states of the South were forced to fight, to prevent the federal bureaucracy of the North, from overriding states laws, and heavy handedly deciding which sectors would prosper or die. She said that both sides were fighting over the interpretation of a document that they both had assisted in writing; a document called the Constitution.
Abraham Lincoln saw into the future. Before he was elected, he visualized himself helping to guide the ship of state though a practically unavoidable Civil War, and into the calmer waters of a unified nation. He recognized the peril in a legislature controlled by financial interests, and so he favored more government control of the currency. He also recognized that the abolition of slavery was close at hand. For those things, and because the North was the seat of federal power, he was vilified as the symbol of tyranny.
Assassins lay in wait for him on his inaugural route. An alarming number of conspirators, from both the North and the South, both men and women, planned his demise. Many individuals and several teams of agents were on call to kill him if and when the opportunity presented. Within the District of Columbia, a city of spies, and foreign financial interests, there may have been more people against President Lincoln than for him.
The Lincoln White House was surrounded by the encampment of a full Union company. A special cavalry unit accompanied the president and his carraige when he traveled outside. Even so, Lincoln's hat was shot off on one of those outings. When it was later recovered, it had a bullet hole. Throughout this hideous internal conflict, units from both sides engaged in biological warfare, smuggling food, clothing and other provisions contaminated with viruses such as influenza, yellow fever and small pox amongst the military and civilian populations. People aware of these happenings speculated privately that the Lincoln's youngest son may have been one of the victims. But that wasn't reported in the press because no one could bring themselves to hear such information.
Nana referred to President Lincoln's failed efforts to avoid the war and preserve the Union by compensating slave owners, as high-minded. But even though some of the Wilson's admitted he struggled to do the right thing, their banking associates were still against him for purely financial reasons. When it was ordered that all houses on the avenue had to display black in honor of the slain president, they refused. And when a young captain and his squad returned on horseback to give Nana the choice of either displaying something black, or being taken to jail, she defiantly hung a black umbrella on the door knob.
The Civil War was clearly fought to make rich men richer. But It appears that people were all mixed up at the time, much like today, when they debate about Health Care, or Taxes, while remaining aloof about the main problem with our country, and the world at the moment, Banking Policy. Financiers in Europe wanted to destabilize our new country in order to profit from both sides of the conflict. Foreign powers such as the English, and the French at our borders in Mexico and Canada, awaited the opportunity to take back what they believed should be their land. Our own legislators, their financial ties, and our enemies too, were complicit strangling the South with tariffs and embargos to keep European goods competitive, even to the extent of interfering with contracts for commodities such as cotton from the South to the North.
Some school books still teach that Lincoln's killer, John Wilkes Booth, was just a crazy lone gunman, an egotistical actor, and a white supremacist who wanted to go down in history. That may be true. But people like great grandmother Nana, on the Wilson side of the family, have told a different, more compelling story. According to information verified after the assassination, Booth was the leader of a Confederate team, complicit with members of the Lincoln administration, that originally planned to kidnap President Lincoln during the war. And the Wilsons later learned of the agents who received money from a multinational banking family, delivered by the Zouaves through Canada, to help finance the coup d'etat.
Now, the blue of the North and the gray of the South have blended into the khaki of a United States army. And both sides once at odds in our family war, are together without apparent differences: Soldiers of the Union and soldiers of the Confederacy, Union agent Thomas O'Flaherty and his cousin from south of the Mason Dixon Line, Mary Surratt, Democrats and Republicans, those aligned with international bankers and those aligned with President Lincoln and his
Greenback agenda, all together now in their family plot, Section 12, at venerable Mount Olivet Cemetery.
Joe Lynch, my great uncle on my mother's side, was with the Department of State forever. He may have even been there when the U.S. Embassy in London couriered Pop's observations to the Pentagon during World War Two.
Pop as a youngster, also the youngest of his brothers, just like his father. He believed that a kid with a ball in his hand is less likely to pick up a rock.
To put this in perspective... my grandfather Mike ("the Old Centerfielder") worked all his life as a printer for the government. He was the youngest of his four brothers. My father (2nd from right in the photo below) was also the youngest of his brothers and sister, and he was also kind of old when I was born. My point is, that spanning so many generations gives people an advantage of perspective. These gentlemen grew up in a Washington D.C. with dirt and cobblestone streets, before there were cars. As a child, Pop and his friends experienced the last parade of the Grand Army of the Republic as 70,000 Union veterans marched down Pennsylvania Avenue toward the White House. On that night they stayed out beyond curfew to visit with the veterans around their campfires on the banks of the Potomac.
Jim on the left was a career military man, serving in the infantry in World War I and retiring as a Commander in the Navy. Leo on the right, worked as an electronics engineer for the Navy Department all his life. His group developed sonar. When I asked him how they got the technology he said "From the birds". Second from left, "Pat", was a local coach and athletic star who served in the military during the Mexican border campaign in 1916 and was a flying officer for the Signal Corps in World War I. He pitched for the New York baseball Giants and played at the opposite end of the line from George Hallas on the 1923 Chicago Bears.
Chicago Bears, 1923
"Pat" served during World War II and the Korean War and was discharged from the Marine Corps with the rank of major. During the 1920's he married Dorothea Xaviera Fugazy, the daughter of boxing promoter Humbert J. "Jack" Fugazy, who dared to operate in the Big Apple during the day of Tex Rickard. He had a successful career as an executive with the thriving music publishing business of Da Silva, Henderson and Brown, during the days of Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt's, and Mayor James Walker's New York City. In 1927 he fixed Pop up with Knute Rockne for a football scholarship at Notre Dame.
"Pat" was strict when as a child Pop started to develop a speech impediment. His well meaning discipline actually made Pop's stuttering worse. That's why Pop ended up becoming a writer. But one thing Pat and his brothers put on him really stuck. Never lie, and never steal, they told him. Pop took that to heart. He gained a reputation for it, and it ended up making him a success.
When Wall Street, and the New York economy crashed, it squeezed Pat's successful company, Da Silva, Brown and Henderson. So he moved to California to work as a producer for the little studio Joe Kennedy purchased with profits from the stock market, 20th Century Fox. But most everyone underestimated the time it would take for the economy to recover. Banks were still failing and being absorbed by the larger ones that foreclosed on farms and homes as fast as they could. Amidst a sea of perverse incentives, sweetheart deals, and corporate socialism, the very rich got richer, and the poor became even poorer and more desperate. Unemployment and poverty took on grotesque proportions. In Hollywood, there was a lot less financing available for pictures, and film production slowed to about 30% of what it had been. So, around 1931, less than two years after the Wall Street crash, Pat's position as a producer at Fox evaporated, although he used his connections to obtain a five year contract as an actor to Republic Pictures. He was pretty much stuck with his acting career by default, Wall Street Bank default if you know what I mean, and despite the administration's continual proclamations that recovery was underway, the natural cycle of recovery from the so-called Great Depression went on for many people, a lot longer than anybody anticipated, and "Pat" appeared in hundreds of films during the 30's, 40's and 50's when the U.S. economy again boomed.
Here is "Pat" in a film called Meet John Doe, a statement of the times intended to provide optimism to average Americans many of whom really had little hope in the face of a government corrupted by the money and power of monopoly banks and corporations. Growing up, I was always disappointed when I saw Pat in movies, because he was seldom the lead, and I knew he was the roughest and toughest of action heroes in real life. The thing about Pat the actor was, he did not look like a leading man, but when he went into action he was powerful, graceful, and handsome. His good looks emerged from within. You had to be quick to keep up with him though.
They should have had more cameras rolling in the first scene of Meet Danny Wilson with Frank Sinatra, when Pat did his own stunt and broke his back. In another picture about the O.K. Corral with John Wayne, he is in a saloon and picks a fight with Wayne. I saw that movie when I was a kid. I don't remember what the name of it was, but it was in color so it must have been after the war. I just found Pat in another saloon fight with Wayne in an older black and white Republic picture named Angel and the Badman. It's on the internet. I didn't have time to watch it, so I just let it play in the background until I heard his distinctive voice at 1:07.
Around 1934, Pat had a pretty good part in a movie about Army Air pilots with Robert Taylor who got all of Pat's two shots, and over the shoulder shots with him cut out. Anyway, Pat Flaherty was the kind of person I wanted to see when I went to the show, not the Hollywood pretty boys with their fake horses, fake punches, and stuntmen. He made me dream that if I were an actor, I'd just make action movies, and I'd give people the real deal.
"Pat" coaches "Coop"
Gary Cooper, Edmund J. "Pat" Flaherty
CYNTHIA
(Lillian)
One day I went into my father's den and caught him looking at her picture. He said, "Don't let your mother know that I have this."
Before he knew my mother, my father had known Lillian, and he had loved her, with a love according to a letter from someone who knew them, that was beyond par with the love that was shared between Abelard and Heloise.
While he struggled to learn journalism on football scholarships, she became a top model in New York; with contracts such as Pepsodent toothpaste. But that did not keep them apart. She went with him to Georgia Tech where he quit because of the religious intolerance of his Baptist team mates. She followed him to Notre Dame where Knute Rockne brought him up from the freshman squad to play with the Varsity. He left there too when he found out he couldn't have the courses in Journalism he wanted.
She traveled to visit him at Marquette, in Milwaukee Wisconsin where he pursued Journalism, and was co-captain of the football team. They were inseparable, the two of them, and when they were together they rejoiced in planning the life they would share together. However when he graduated and they were about to be married, she contracted a rare disease of the heart and was dead within two months. Vincent X. went on, without her, to become a great writer. He became a big success, one of the most influential journalists in the world. Just like she always told him he would. But when he finally had the success that they had dreamed about together, she was no longer there to share it with him.
Used friendship with JFK
Toward the end of Pop's career, when his friend William Randolph Hearst had passed away, after the advent of television, the newspaper business and the power of the press
in general began to decline. Bill Hearst Jr. was shutting down newspapers left and right, and requiring remaining employees to take a cut in pay. So Pop quit the Hearst syndicate and used his friendship with JFK and publisher Phil Graham to get his column back on the Washington Post where he had once contributed at the start of his career. For a short time he was overjoyed to return to his roots. But then a few things went slightly wrong.
The Post's publisher, a member of the O.S.S., and later a CIA operative, and a close ally of JFK, reportedly killed himself, after being unknowingly dosed with a powerful hallucinogenic, and taken away in a straight jacket by men in white coats, to a place deceptively called Chestnut Lodge. A different story than what I just related, was memorialized in the main stream media. In fact a different truth was held by many people closer to Graham than we were. But Pop never got to publish much on the Post after Phil Graham was neutralized, and America never got to see much more of Pop's kind of journalism. And when JFK was murdered, Pop lost the most powerful supporter he had for his project AMERICA, a wonderful project based upon the conversations he recorded with famous Americans like John Wayne, and Martin Luther King. Pop knew it was important for Americans to hear firsthand not only How these individuals achieved personal success in America, but Why they did.
Thereafter, Pop spent his time writing free lance articles, and his tell-all novel CYNTHIA, which, aside from being about his fiance Lillian who died on the eve of their wedding and haunted him the rest of his life, is essentially his autobiography. It is an eloquently written but sometimes brutally frank journal about the relationships and the secrets of his powerful friends who shaped the century.
The novel reveals, among other things, information from his mother's side of the family, from before there was a Washington D.C., and brings to light names of Northern and Southern businessmen, bankers and officials, and their alleged motives behind the plots to assassinate President Lincoln. It describes what it was like growing up as the youngest of a humble Irish family during turn of the century District of Columbia two blocks from J. Edgar Hoover; how he and his pals effectively started pro football as we know it today; his confidential reports for President Roosevelt while staying with each of the commanding generals in their various theaters of combat during World War II; his relationship with socialite Evalyn Walsh McLean who once gave him the Hope Diamond to hold during a dinner party (it remained in his pocket the whole evening, curse and all); his relationship with William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies and their hidden daughter Patricia Lakeand his godson Arthur Lake; his relationship and falling out with Howard Hughes; his insights about the thinking of the people who made ten U.S. presidents; his unique perspective on the ones most responsible for the Kennedy assassinations, and other more positive topics.
As one might imagine, there was great interest in this book, initially from major publishers and from studios. But then the book was suppressed. Paramount Pictures passed on it with the comment that it was not cinematic because it followed the protagonist's long list of extraordinary exploits throughout his entire life. Later they made a picture called Forrest Gump, similar in scope, but lacking historical significance. So far it has grossed over a billion dollars.
Today, it is a little frightening, and sobering, to think that the message of my Pop, one of the greatest writers, has been suppressed, and his writings have been forgotten... as if they never existed. And while suppression is regarded as a practice of abusive corporate or government power, there is a more prevalent, more insidious kind of suppression, and it is a suppression that begins with the manipulation of the collective consciousness, and belief systems embedded within the public mind.
When he passed away, I went over to the house and I noticed he had been editing his epic novel CYNTHIA. He had changed all the fictional names to the real names of the influential people depicted. He had even modified the part of how Lillian (who he calls Cynthia in the book) died just before they were going to be married. The last page, of the last revised chapter, was still in the typewriter, and the last line, which was the last line he wrote before he died, concluded, "...he had finally married Cynthia Overton." So I took that out of the typewriter for him, as he had never intended that Mom, who he loved, would read it.
My Mom, Katherine Regina O'Higgins, whom they called Kitty.
All the big shots in Hollywood had their wive's portraits painted by George Quaintance. So Pop gave her this portrait as a present. The problem was that she had to sit for it, and she didn't like it. She didn't care for the whole idea of it. She didn't care for George either as the painting dragged on, and so he had to finish it from a photograph. This painting was done at the same time she and Pop were being sued because she had been turning a corner in Westwood Village when four or five Mexicans jumped in front of her Cadillac. This had a profound effect upon her. She gave up driving entirely, and never drove a car again until she was eighty years old.
When Pop returned to D.C. from his scholarship at Marquette, in Milwaukee, he was expecting employment as a journalist. But he couldn't find any kind of work. His mother gave him a penny with a hole drilled in it so he could wear it around his neck to remind him that he was never "penniless". It was the advent of the "Great Depression". The world economy was in free fall, and banks were gobbling up people's farms and homes. In the meantime, he had sought solace by going to church, where one day he saw three lovely young sisters coming down the aisle from Holy Communion. Some people at the church called them the three graces. And so somehow, according to God's will he believed, he had fallen in love, and was married..., and broke.
He (2nd from right) found a little work as a sparring partner for Young Stribling, and
Jack Sharkey. He needed the money. But he wasn't a boxer. I remember him telling me how he "panicked" and was compelled to stand on Sharkey's instep and jab a thumb into his eye. He felt like he was on the verge of going nuts when he noticed that Washington was flooded with college grads who were unsuccessfully looking for government jobs, and many of them were All American football stars.
Without meaning to, he essentially helped start pro football as we know it today. He put together a team of college football stars who had come to Washington looking for government jobs. Twelve of them were college All Americans. They travelled throughout the East, taking on the local teams, and in order to make more money they agreed to play two games a week, which was difficult. It left them limping from one game to the next. They made a lot of money, but at the end of their season, it was also the end of their team.
Years later, among other things, he went on to found the Baltimore Colts and the Cleveland Browns, picking the owners and the coaches... But during the depths of the Depression, the financial success of his football team was just a temporary profit. So he played the next season with the Washington Senators professional football club, and he continued to hound the newspapers for a job as a journalist.
LANDS A JOB
Finally, out of desperation, an editor told him "Bring me an interview from somebody important, and I will take it to the managing editor." The most important person he could think of was Franklin D. Roosevelt, and luckily he had grown up in the same neighborhood as the White House press secretary Steven Early. So he requested an interview with the president.
At first Early was inclined to turn him down, but knowing his good character, submitted his name for a 5 minute interview with Roosevelt. And Roosevelt, having vetted him out, and learning in advance of his trustworthy reputation, took a liking to him. The 5 minute interview grew into 2 hours, as the president searched his old scrapbooks for photos. Plus, Roosevelt had decided to make the interview one of a series, featuring each one of his cabinet members.
With the world in his pocket, Pop was offered jobs by both the Washington Herald and the Post. And Roosevelt had gained another loyal friend to surround him in the press.
Vincent X., Mr. and Mrs. George DeWitt, Kitty Flaherty
"Pat" Flaherty, Willaim Powell
My Man Godfrey was was filmed in 1935 during the throes of the Depression, and it certainly is the "real deal". It is a movie about one of the forgotten people during the Great Depression, a so-called "forgotten man", played by William Powel, who rich elites try to find as part of a silly parlor game. Once a big financial success, he had been turned into a bum. The role Pat plays of "Mike Flaherty" is in a similar Depression oriented vien, about another hardworking citizen turned into a homeless person. At the end, Powell's character "Godfrey" finally finds a way to make money again by taking on a profession for which he is over-qualified. He opens a nightclub, and Pat's character "Mike" finds employment as the doorman.
This movie is art imitating life in a number of ways. For instance, Pat was originally a big wheel as a music publisher in New York City. He came west to produce for 20th Centruy Fox, but the Depression hit and he had to take work as an actor. It is the same story as the role of the character he plays of the same last name in My Man Godfrey, who finds work at a job for lesser pay. Such people were fortunate then, because for millions, there was no work whatsoever.
And this is exactly what we have going on today; where you have a highly qualified Union worker, an expert on assembling a Northstar engine, for instance, forced to take work driving a paver on a government project in order to support his family. The main difference in America today is that thanks to most politicians and their corporate bankster masters we have an import/consumer driven economy. Whereas then, America had a strong manufacturing/export driven economic foundation while we struggled through the Long Depression, as politicians pretended there was a recovery underway, and America drifted imperceptibly, inexorably, into the inevitable World War Two...
Meanwhile, after covering Washington D.C., for the Times Herald and the Post for over ten years, Pop became a regular visitor at the White House. He accompanied President Roosevelt and his people in the press car of the president's train during three campaigns. He was also a visitor to the Pentagon. It was there that his suggestion led his friend General Hap Arnold to change the color of the Air Force uniform from khaki to blue.
However another one of his suggestions didn't go over too well when he opined that it wasn't smart for all the legislators and top brass to attend the Army Navy game in Philadelphia. Aside from the security threat, he felt that in the event of a national emergency, it would be better for the game to be taking place in Washington D.C., just across the Potomac from the Pentagon. Nevertheless, on his next visit there, General MacArthur stormed into the room and proclaimed "The Army Navy game is my baby, and it is going to stay where it is!" Indeed, MacArthur was married to Louise Cromwell, the Philadelphia banking heiress, and he wished to keep the owners of the purse strings to the Mainline happy.
An incredible assignment
Some years later, with the advent of World War II, the Roosevelt administration asked General Arnold to call Vincent X. back to the Pentagon again, where he was abruptly given the incredible assignment of covering the war while living with Generals Eisenhower, Doolittle, Patton, Vandenburg, Spaatz, Quesada, Brereton, and Allen, in their respective theaters of combat. He left the Pentagon in such a rush to get his uniforms and board his flight, that he neglected to sign out. At least one person, his friend Bob Addie for instance, reported him in the Washington Post as missing, while the Pentagon maintianed that according to their records, he was still there.
Officially, he had been assigned as a war correspondent to write columns about the war for the Washington Times Herald, which were to be submitted through the proper channels for censorship by military intelligence at SHAEF. But he also had been given an undisclosed task of delivering messages, and writing a different kind of report, a report the censors never saw, that was never published anywhere, that almost nobody knew about, that was delivered through O.S.S. operatives to the US Embassy in London and from there by courier to the White House. It was common for President Roosevelt to use people in that way.
With Major General Terry M. Allen a few hours before the final drive. On the back of this photo he wrote, "Crossed the Roer River February 23, 1945 at 2:45 AM"
Pop with one of his schoolmates, Major General "Pete" Quesada. Pop told me the reason he and Pete look a little ill in this picture is because they had just almost been killed. General Quesada had a fighter plane with a specially built rumble seat so his pilot could fly while he did reconnaissance. He personally flew Pop up to get a close up view of the front lines, and they got shot up. They made it back to the field but had to make a crash landing, the kind where the tail of the plane is pointing up in the air at the end.
They had hit the ground hard. Quesada pushed the canopy back. He was yelling, "Dammit to Hell I've broken every goddamn one of them!" Pop thought the general had broken his ribs, until he saw him removing a handful of broken cigars from his breast pocket.
I just had occasion to read the above letters to my mother from Pop, for the first time. I never noticed they were signed by Generals Spatz and Doolittle. In one of them he mentions how she could expedite letters to him by mailing them first to Colonels Libby or Gottlieb, who were at the Pentagon, so they could have it flown to him via courier pouch.
Some of the generals knew that Vincent X. was doing more than just reporting as a war correspondent. He was looking out for them, delivering messages, and checking up on them for the president as well. The useful information from the connections he made, appeared in his newspapar column when approved by the censors. The more sensitive information was never submitted for censorship but couriered from the U.S. Embassy to Washington. At any rate, all of the generals were very nice to him.
Pop and his buddies from the Swoose Gang, in Chicago.
The Swoose was mostly a B17 bomber. It was assembled from parts of destroyed planes that were caught on the ground in the Philippines eight hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Back then, even as the planes in the Philippines were being demolished, our legislators maintained they were feeling pretty secure about America's state of preparedness. Then as now, many of them would have rathered squander money on their cronies, than approve the expenses of maintaining efficient armed forces. The Swoose, which I believe can now be seen at the Smithsonian in Washington, is a grim reminder that one of America's greatest insurances for peace, is a modern and powerful Air Force.
President Roosevelt's cortege arrives at the White House before entering the grounds to pull up before the Guard of Honor which may be seen in front of the mansion proper. Vincent X. Flaherty is the civilian on the other side of the street. He was the White House correspondent who accompanied the Roosevelt family and the casket from Union Station.
Many years later, Vincent X. happened to be with another president's family at a somber time. He was having lunch in the Lorraine Room of the Lafayette Square Hotel, with Eunice Kennedy Shriver, sister of President Kennedy, and her husband Sargent Shriver when the news of President Kennedy's assassination broke. He and Shriver helped spare Eunice of the bad news for about forty minutes, and it wasn't until they were leaving the restaurant that she found out.
William Randolph Hearst was a fan
Hearst was a big fan of his writing, and over a period of years continually offered him more money to leave the paper in Washington and work for the Hearst Syndicate. Finally Hearst offered him a higher salary than any other journalist in the country, and that persuaded him. But in order to earn it, he had to write a 1,000 word sports column four days a week, a 1,000 word general interest column twice a week, and a 1,000 word
"Pictorial Review" column for King Features Syndicate that ran once a week in the glossy supplement to the national Sunday edition.
This is the testimonial dinner they gave Pop when he decided to take William Randolph Hearst's offer to relocate to the west coast.
He used to dream about what he was going to have to write about.
So that is roughly how Pop made it from being a poor Irish kid, to a person with friends in high places. I know a bit about the friends he made who attended the farewell dinner. But a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing when you don't have the whole picture. Anyway, I shall start at the top. Which is always a good place to go first...
1. General Hap Arnold, the only five star general in both the U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force, and the most influential member of the first Joint Chiefs of Staff, could hold his liquor with the best of them. And Pop was among the best who were known to have shared a drink with the general. I know that because when Pop visited the Kremlin he became engaged in a little vodka drinking with two Soviet generals, and when they passed out he took their insignia. But General Arnold was aware that President Roosevelt was concerned about his drinking, because he went out of his way to show Pop he had quit drinking entirely. He stated the war effort was more important than ever taking another drink. He even gave Pop a "shot glass" that his staff had given him, and it's no ordinary shot glass, it's silver, and it holds 3 ounces. It even has a handle that is a bottle opener and unscrews to become a cork screw. It's engraved with his nickname, "HAP". General Arnold said he wouldn't be needing it anymore, and that Pop deserved it.
2. Bugs Baer was a great American journalist. W.R. Hearst recognized his genius and pursued him to become a King Features Syndicate writer. There is more about Mr. Baer in Pop's novel CYNTHIA.
3. Leslie Biffle was a master in human relationships, a high level Roosevelt operative, and a component of the glue that held not only the administration, but the whole legislature together.
4. Happy Chandler was the Governor of Kentucky until he came up against the two consecutive term limit. Pop and his friend General John O. Gottlieb saw to it that he became elected as the Commissioner of Baseball. Subsequently,
Happy Chandler ran for Governor of Kentucky. He was elected again, and thereafter appointed Pop as a general on his staff.
5. Bob Considine, was a fine American journalist published internationally with the Hearst Syndicate. He wrote the Babe Ruth Story, and unlike many who write biographies, he was actually a friend of Ruth. He was a Papal Knight and when he died the Pope blessed a crucifix and sent it to rest upon his casket.
It is not an ordinary crucifix. It's a fine piece of religious sculpture set upon on an engraved silver pedestal that was once a 13th century box for holding jewelry, or the Eucharist. When Bob died his family gave it to Pop. Now I have the thing.
I always wonder what story the ancient box would tell if it could. For all I know, the Pope's cavaliere erranti robbed the box and the jewels in it from the elite occupants of a 13th century coach. The devil makes me think things like that.
6. Bill Corum was a talented announcer and journalist who was recruited by W.R. Hearst to write for the New York Evening Journal. Corum was an expert on the fight game, and the track. Thereafter, he became President of the American Turf Association and Churchill Downs.
7. General Jimmy Doolittle was one of the generals Pop visited during the war. He distinguished himself as the leader of the MISSION OF NO RETURN, the first squadron to attack Japan after Pearl Harbor, even though their planes couldn't hold enough gas to get back. He and some of his men survived by barely making it to mainland China.
8. James Forrestal was the Secretary of the Navy, and was appointed by President Truman as the first Secretary of Defense. He was one of the early cold warriors behind the National Security Council directive NSC 4A, which in effect implemented, among other things, the CIA's covert funding of various political campaigns worldwide. He once refused to speak with an official at a location where he believed they would be recorded, and stated privately that the "Communists and Jews" were "after" him. He was involuntarily taken to the Bethesda Naval Hospital where they say he committed suicide. The reports of his demise were contradictory. But in any event, whether or not Forrestal's demise was orchestrated by covert powers, he was a bonafide casualty of the war.
Whew. This list is taking longer to write than I wanted, and as you can see from my last comments about Forrestal, I'm starting to get a little tired. I'll be back to finish it soon I hope... It's Saturday and I'm going for a bike ride.
Well I went for a bike ride like I said I was going to when I left off. But it's been a couple of years since I left off. To save time now, and in the interest of memorializing a bit about Pop's friends at the close of World War II, before their memories are relegated to an obscure and inaccurate footnote somewhere, I've decided to polish off the rest of them like this...
10. Charles Hart, graduated from Pop's alma mater Eastern High School, in 1895, and later became an educator and principal there. His influence contributed to the future success of countless students. Two D.C. schools are named after him. Otherwise I cannot find any internet record of this educator to whom so many prominent individuals owed their lives. I have his unpublished autobiography in my own files.
11. Clark Griffith, played for 7 pro baseball teams, managed 4, and owned the Washington Senators.
The assassination of Hearst in the public mind by the publishers of rival newspapers began to occur during his rise to control of the lion's share of American media. Hearst was a congressman in New York who was barely defeated in his campaign for governor. He was later a candidate for president, and his political adversaries were eager to assist in assassinating his reputation. It is the same phenomenon that occurred around Czar Nicholay II of Russia and his family, and to President Kennedy.
Some disparaging comments about Hearst on the internet today read verbatim:
"Forget Hitler. I'd kill THIS motherfucker if I had a time machine"
bigmtnfudgecake
And,
"Wasn't he the racist corrupt guy who helped get marijuana illegal by publishing yellow journalism?"
Will9469
It is a bitterly sad commentary on how people are swayed by agenda driven propaganda repeatedly propounded upon them by the media. Hearst recognized that power and attempted to keep it honest. His underlying passion was only to make a difference for good in the world.
13. William Hutchinson Although listed on the program as representing the I.N.S., Hutchinson was one of the first O.S.S. agents. He worked with Pop's friend General Gottlieb, who was in charge of transportation at the Pentagon, in upgrading the specifications for the ancient Burma Road to accommodate modern vehicles and tanks during World War II. Neither of them will ever receive credit for their contributions which rightly went to Gottlieb's friend, General Joe Stillwell. Stillwell's regiment handled construction, and fighting the Japanese Army. Although promoted to the rank of general, Gottlieb didn't like taking credit for anything and played it down. He preferred to remain known as Col. Gottlieb throughout his life and was fine with the Music Center's plaque that said Col. John O. Gottlieb. But when they were old, Pop had the Music Center change it to Gen. John O. Gottlieb.
14. Col. Edward J. Kelly was the Chief of Police of the District of Columbia. He went on to become the Superintendent of the National Capitol Parks, and overseeing the United States Park Police.
16. Jack Lavelle, played football with Pop for Knute Rockne at Notre Dame, and among other vocations, was a scout for the N.Y. Giants.
17. Al Lodwick was one of Howard Hughes' right hand men. He had been he flight operations manager for Hughes' around-the-world flight in 1938, was a founder of present day military aviation training facilities, and the purchaser of post war government property for Hughes Enterprises.
18. James M. Mead, held New York's 42nd senatorial district from 1918 until 1947. In 1946 he ran for Governor of New York but was defeated by Thomas Dewey. He was the grandson of revolutionary hero Gen. Mead, of George Washington's staff.
19. Tom Meany was Chairman of the Baseball Writer's Association.
20. James P. McGranery, was at the time the assistant to the Attorney General of the United States. He was responsible for supervising the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Immigration and Naturalization Service, Bureau of Prisons and various divisions. He later served as a judge of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. In 1952, President Harry Truman appointed McGranery Attorney General of the United States.
21. Joseph D. Nunan, was Commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service.
22. Ed Pauley, whose name is misspelled on the program, managed to remain relatively unknown, but was, among other things, the most powerful of all oilmen, directing the distribution from foreign oilfields, back in the days when the motives of oil companies aligned in the interest of the integrity of America.
23. Steven T. Porter was Chief of the D.C. Fire Department.
24. Shirley Povich, was sports editor of the Washington Post for 41 years, and one of Pop's best friends.
25. Jimmy Powers, was one of Pop's ballplaying pals from Marquette, went on to become sports editor of the New York Daily News.
26. Ray Richards, played for 5 pro football teams and coached 4.
27. Gene Tunney, was the undefeated world heavyweight boxing champion.
28. Fred Vinson, went from being the son of a jailer in a small Kentucky town, to the 13th Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
29. Leonard Patrick Walsh, was the chief judge of Washington's municipal court. In 1959, President Eisenhower appointed him Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia.
In this photo: Gene Tunney, Happy Chandler, Vincent X., Fred Vinson, Jimmy Doolittle
During the war Pop assisted Commander Gene Tunney, on the left, with his Navy physical fitness program. Tunney, the son of an Irish immigrant, went on to retire as the first undefeated Heavyweight Boxing Champion. He is the only person to hold that distinction besides Rocky Marciano.
Pop and his friend General John O. Gottlieb, a colonel at the time in charge of transportation at the Pentagon, lobbied on behalf of former Governor, and Senator from Kentucky, Happy Chandler, second from left, and got him elected to the position of Baseball Commissioner. Chandler was a self-made man who had the courage to arrange the integration of Major League Baseball against the wishes of many of the owners, and for that he was not re-elected. But he was however subsequently re-elected Governor of Kentucky.
Second from right, Pop's friend Fred M. Vinson, like the rest of these men, was neither one of the so-called elite. He was a self made man, the son of a small town Kentucky jailer who developed an understanding of people and human relationships, and implemented that knowledge to become one of the most useful people on Capitol Hill. After the death of Hitler, the end of World War II, and the death of President Roosevelt, all within days of one another, President Truman appointed Vinson Secretary of the Treasury. Thereafter, he became the thirteenth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.
Vinson understood the scope of the struggle during the Great Depression while many of those at the top of government spending programs, the politicians and the banks supporting them, appeared to be just out of touch, when they knew exactly what they were doing. In reality, the working class was thoroughly imprisoned by the industrial monopolies and international bankers behind the central banking controlled monetary system. But Fred Vinson was a far cry from the industrialists and financiers who pulled the rug out from under the country, and the world, between 1926 and 1940.
World's worst financial pullback provokes reassessment of the International Monetary Fund
Vinson became well ensconced in Washington D.C. as a three term congressional representative from Kentucky. He was part of the deliberately over-optimistic Roosevelt team that promised to bring about recovery. But while the Roosevelt administration as a whole attempted to revive the economy, there was no quick fix due to perverse incentives upon which the financial powers had begun to operate. True, the Roosevelt team managed to pass watershed bank regulation legislation known as the Glass-Steagall Acts, to curb, among other things, bank monopolization. Those laws should have been law before the crash, although that was simply not possible due to the level of control established by industrialists and bankers during the Wilson administration. Those interests acted ruthlessly for self preservation..., second only to greed.
In order to right the ship of state, Roosevelt's predecessor, President Herbert Hoover, had attempted to correct the Wilson era concessions of power which had been conceded at the expense of the welfare of the country, to the leaders of finance and industry. But the negative impact of the Hoover administration's deficit spending would only be surpassed by the coming consequences of the Roosevelt administration's corporate socialism, sweetheart deals, and the wealth funneled away from the middleclass and poor.
Millions of men survived only by joining Roosevelt's Conservation Corps, and earning the most minimum of wages, while the international corporate and banking elite made themselves even richer in many ways, by bringing about World War II. They financed the reconstruction of Germany, and thereafter sold steel and oil to all sides of the conflict. Meanwhile, a secret tunnel was excavated from the White House to the Treasury where a huge vault storing opium was converted to a bomb shelter. In Los Angeles, hundreds of acres of prime Wilshire Boulevard real estate were gobbled up for pennies on the dollar by government connected opportunists, after the rightful Japanese owners had been taken away to camps.
If the way central bankers and their politicians have covered up today's great American payment shock mortgage securitization swindle, and resultant bank bailout con, is an explanatory first act for the destructive charade to come, then President Roosevelt's "New Deal" as a prologue for the ethical depravity that enabled World War II, even with its beneficial minimum wage, social security, and Glass-Steagall acts, might well have been ultimately titled the Raw Deal" or the "Same Old Deal" for all I know. I'm afraid my trust in the main stream historical record has been shaken. But I studied the actions of the Roosevelt administration when I was in college, and since then. I have always read everything I could get my hands on about Roosevelt's influences, and it is my opinion that President Roosevelt was no stooge or puppet of international industrialists and central bankers, as has been asserted by folks looking for easy answers to complex problems. His job as President, among other things, entailed walking the line between ruling industrialists and bankers, national socialists, communists, and the public interest, and the members of his administration did their best given the circumstances.
For instance, Fred Vinson was a stand up guy. He helped found the International Monetary Fund, not as an instrument of a corrupt new world order to financially rape and change the fabric of sovereign nations, but in the interest of stabilizing the world economy after the war, at a time when our government still had a few laws, and the guts, to keep industrialists and the members of international banks somewhat straight. It is often not institutions that are of themselves imprudent or evil, only those who sometimes come to power within them, and it is too bad there have not always been leaders of the IMF with the insight and level headed integrity of its first chairman Fred Vinson.
It is a crying shame that after the Crash of 1929, amidst the politics of greed, it had taken the destruction of France, Germany, England, Italy and Japan, and then bank regulations, the institution of the IMF, changing the map of the Middle East, and the Eisenhower administration's creation of the secondary mortgage market to finally, after twenty years, bring about a genuine recovery and the American prosperity of the 1950's.
General Jimmy Doolittle, on the right, was an aviation pioneer and recipient of the Medal of Honor for his Mission of No Return. His squadron was first to attack the Japanese mainland after Pearl Harbor even though their planes held only enough fuel to get there. He was ultimately honored with the rank of Four Star General, and became a vice president of Shell Oil in the days when it was still cool to work for an oil company ;- )
In their time, all of the people in this picture were celebrated for their terrific contributions to society. But now that they are gone, particularly with regard to the easier targets, the two politicians from Kentucky, their stories have been disparaged by people of questionable political motive. This is a phenomenon that occurs more universally to high profile individuals, once they are dead and cannot speak for themselves.
For instance, there are those who say that Treasury Secretary Vinson and President Roosevelt were merely pawns when they founded the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, as a New World Order front for predatory capitalists from a hereditary line of international bankers. Indeed, there is abundant evidence that central bankers have often profited greatly for enslaving the countries of the world in debt, and during its 65 year history, the IMF appears to have sometimes been used as a tool to periodically shear the public of its savings. But that only goes to show that organizations founded with good intentions are only as good as the people we allow to gain control of them, and that all international financial associations and the economic, social, and ideological systems they serve, should not necessarily be destroyed, but allowed to learn from one another, and sometimes even be saved from themselves.
In many cases, the IMF was indispensable. It provided the liquidity and the flexibility to rebuild the world economy after World War II. It increased the standard of living worldwide, and it often appeared to act unselfishly in the interest of Democracy. In summation, Secretary of the Treasury Fred Vinson founded the IMF in good faith. He and the others in this picture were outstanding citizens in their fields, even heroes, although they would have preferred to have us remember them simply as good men.
If it's in print... it must be true
Jimmy Durante, Pop, Kitty Flaherty, ?, in Chicago
When Pop accepted the job with Hearst, his brothers warned him to keep his nose to the grindstone, and avoid getting involved in the Hollywood scene. It took him a while to settle in and meet the right people. Does anybody know who these folks are? I think the man on the right must be a comedian... a young Sid Caesar maybe.
Pop tried all the best restaurants. Here he is enjoying the company of Mike Romanoff (Romanoff's), Charlie Morrison (The Mocambo) and Dave Chasen (Chasen's).
L-R Standing: ?, Charlie Morrison, ?, Dr. Lee Siegel , Vincent X., ?, bandleader ?
Seated: back to camera Noreen Nash Siegel, ?, Janet Thomas (future Mrs. Fred De Cordova), Stu Martin (who married Angela Green that year after columnist Louella Parsons reported that Angela and "Jack Kennedy will not get married as announced. It's all off and he is running for Congress his district."), Kitty Flaherty. Charlie Morrison the owner of the club, is the gentleman with the white hair on the left. My Pop is the one with the harp, and his friend Dr. Lee Seigel, who was the doctor at 20th Century Fox for nearly 20 years, is on his right.
That is Charlie Morrison on the left, a prince of a man, at his club The Mocambo. Prior to the crash of 1929, during the heady days of Mayor James Walker, he had been the top theatrical agent in New York City. Man in middle unknown.
Bob Addie, Toots Shor, Frank Sinatra, Commando Kelly, Vincent X., Bob Considine, in Manhattan
After the war, Sinatra had lost popularity and his records weren't selling. He was dropped from the label. He was still driving his souped up 1949 black Cadillac convertible because he had just forfeited the newer one in divorce to Ava Gardner. He owed the IRS a bundle in back taxes, and he was broke. So Charlie Morrison booked him at the Mocambo for 2 months, and meanwhile Pop plugged him in the paper a couple times a week saying all the stars and the Hollywood in crowd were there every night, and how great he was.
Soon the place was packed. Sinatra gained a record contract from it, and from that the credibility to get his audition for "From Here to Eternity". He was was back on top. Pop had admired his car, the black caddy convertible, so Sinatra just gave it to him. Since Pop could not be bought, he found out what the car was worth and sent Sinatra a check.
Second owner '49 Cadillac with big cam
My mom, Kitty, with her dog Black Magic, in a '54 Cadillac straight from Eaton's dealership in Carrolton Georgia.
Going through all these pictures has brought back memories of things I had forgotten since my brain injury in Italy; things I had forgotten entirely, or things that I thought might just be fanciful exaggerations from my perspective of the past. It is a good thing I was young when it happened, because it took over twenty years to get back to where I was before. But the brain is a wonderful thing. It creates new electro-chemical pathways to repair itself after it has been hurt, and in time, depending upon the severity of the injury, it heals itself.
I don't remember these Cadillacs that were made before I was born. But I vaguely remember others, like a yellow Cadillac Eldorado convertible with a white top and black leather seats, that Eaton delivered to Pop. I have a hand sculpted St. Christopher medalion that was affixed to the dashboard of one of those cars.
I do remember though, the mansard over the bay widow to the kitchen in the background. I had to land on it once when I jumped out the second story window. Pop had a terrible temper.
He also had a very tender side. He was my pal, and always a gentleman.
When I was born a few fighters stopped by the hospital. There was a sign that said "Vincie, 9 lbs. He's a heavyweight." So right away I must have sensed that I was expected to fill some big shoes.
Jack Dempsey, Left Hook Charlie (that is what Jack called Pop for some reason), and Gene Tunney
5 crumb bums: Vincent X., Bob Addie, Toots Shor, Shirley Povich, Bob Considine
Mack Millar, Eva Marie Saint, Walter Winchell, Pop, Gale Storm, Bob Hope, Wilbur Clark
John Wayne and Vincent X. (The Duke wasn't that big. He was just good at upstaging people.)
Never lie, and never steal
Although I would have preferred to go to public school like a regular kid, I soon came to understand that I could not shirk my responsibility. I would one day have to be king.
Pop had a speech impediment resulting in part from his older brother Pat being too strict with him. I 'm sure Pat, who volunteered throughout his life to coach several youth football and baseball teams, meant well. But when Pop stuttered, Pat apparently became exasperated and slapped him a little bit, and that made Pop's affliction even worse. So he rarely spoke, and when he did it was usually only a few words. He made up for that by becoming a great writer. But he also told me one day in one of his longer speeches, "Vincie, never put anything in writing", which was unusual coming from a man who was contractually obligated to write over a thousand words per day.
The one thing he said to me most though, whenever I asked him about the secret of his success, was "Never lie, and never steal." His good reputation was a tremendous asset. Once, after having been told that for a number of years, and noticing that even presidents of the United States sometimes get caught in lies, I questioned him about it. He replied more slowly than ever, "Vincie..., never lie, and never steal."
I don't know if there ever was such a cover of the Saturday Evening Post, but I vaguely remember Norman Rockwell's artwork depicting an all American paper boy of about 7 years old. The boy would have been wearing blue jeans and a striped T shirt. I believe he had one knee buried into a red wagon full of newspapers, as he made his route along a mythical street of picket fences in an American town not that much different than Bedford Falls in Frank Capra's "It's a Wonderful Life."
Rockwell's image captured me. I had been looking forward to growing up to be that kid. So I suppose I might be able to blame Norman Rockwell for starting the rebellion when I did not get to go to public school, where I felt I belonged, and instead found myself in boarding school one day, as a member of the St. John's Military Academy drill team.
Now, I understand that Pop had a plan. He never had the advantage of attending private school when he was a youth, and he wanted to me to have that chance. Private school was one of his gifts to me. He had attended Eastern High School, whereas more affluent families of the neighborhood, like the Hoovers, sent their children a little further away to Central High, a school that offered advanced classes and preparation for college.
The secret to J. Edgar Hoover's success
Pop remembered how as a child he had watched his neighbor J. Edgar Hoover attend Central, and become elected Captain of a well respected outfit called the Brigade of Cadets. The cadets were composed of scholars and athletes. They even marched in the Inauguration Day Parade of Woodrow Wilson. It was an honor to wear their uniform.
I have brushed up on the history of Hoover, and that is where a couple of those facts come from, and god knows I have read his books, and books others have written about him since he is dead, and aside from all that, I can tell you one thing that my that Pop told me firsthand, about how Hoover accomplished his goals during his rise to the top.
No, I am not going to mention what so many people in the world appear to know, about how he was a queer horrible fellow who spent his time snooping and compiling files on everyone, and how we must never allow a man to have that much power again. Nope, that has nothing to do with what I wanted to say, and hello, Hello out there... Don't people realize that leaders have been compiling information on others ever since there have been people, and that the level of surveillance today is far beyond anything that came down in Hoover's era? No, I just wanted to let you know, aside from secret files, what enabled Hoover to become so powerful.
Pop told me Hoover's success was due to discipline; the discipline, and the friendships and loyalties he developed when he was the young Captain of the Regiment of Cadets. Several of those cadets, as well as my godfather Eaton, were recruited by Hoover while he was building the Bureau of Investigation into the organization that was later granted federal authority by Congress in 1935.
Starts a "club"
At any rate, although I did not understand it at the time, military school was one of my Pop's gifts to me. I agreed however, that being the leader of a sharp outfit in school sounded like a great way to get somewhere in life. The problem with that was becoming the leader, because from the politics of military school I was learning how difficult it can be to rise though the ranks.
So I started my own club with my best friends and made myself the president. I went to sleep at miltary school most every night with a transistor radio beneath the pillow playing a black Rock and Roll station, KGFJ, and I dreamed about being a leader of a group like the grown up high school guys we saw making the scene around West Los Angeles with powerful names on the backs of their jackets, like the Counts, or the Barons. I was in the 5th grade.
There used to be a sporting goods store on Olympic west of La Brea that could make any kind of club jacket with any kind of custom emblem or lettering. So our first organized endeavor was to go there and pick something out. We wanted jackets with Old English lettering. Unfortunately, you needed to buy quite a few to get the cost down, and as far as embroidering our name on the back, forget it. That was way out of budget for our 4th grade allowances. But the owner of the store had a number of old emblems that had been left over during the company's history, and he offered to sew our choice of those emblems on the backs of four off-the-rack jackets. We decided that the best emblem was the one of the cobra rising to strike, so that was how we involuntarily became The Cobras. And while the four of us would have preferred to have been called something other than The Cobras, we felt kind of important anyway.
Danny Kaye, Sally Arthur, Bob Hope, me, and Pop
My pal Eatie
Eaton Chalkley, back in the day, before he "went Hollywood" on us...
When I was a kid I was privileged to go to a couple of summer camps. The best was Camp Calvert in the woods of Calvert, Maryland. The place was a replica of a stockade. It had a walkway around the top and everything. One would have expected an Indian attack at any minute. That year we all went down to the coast where we camped on the beach by a haunted house and were told ghost stories while potatoes wrapped in tin foil roasted in a campfire on the sand. But one year, when I was no older than nine, Pop sent me to spend the summer with Eaton, at his ranch down in the Deep South, in a place called Sleepy Hollow.
It was the first time I ever mounted a horse, and as soon as we got out onto the dirt road, it bolted and ran away with me. Holding on wasn't easy on an English saddle, and pulling the reins didn't seem to make any difference at all. I kept looking back over my shoulder because I expected Eaton to catch up and grab the reins. I had seen that in the movies. But no, he just galloped about eight lengths behind the entire time.
"Oh no," I thought as my horse veered off the road, ran up a hill and then careened toward a dense stand of trees with low branches. "Is this horse going to try to knock me off of its back?" Yep. "Is this how the headless horseman lost his head?" Maybe, I thought, with panic in my nine year old heart. "Is this to be my fate!?" But by that time, the horse was crashing through the branches, and I was hugging his neck like an Indian.
Meanwhile, Eaton just stayed behind, all the way back to the barn, which is where runaway horses always go when they are done with their running away, because that is where they eat. And by that time, I was barely hanging onto the underside of the horse's neck... and I was pissed off. "Why the hell didn't you catch up and grab the reins?" I wanted to know. "Because I was afraid your horse would think it was a race and go faster," he said. "You see, these are race horses."
I just could not figure Eaton out. Not until I was a lot older, and had to make my way in polo by breaking ex-thoroughbred race horses into polo ponies, did I realize the nature of the animal I had been on. Races horses are plenty good at running, and a little short in the stopping and turning department.
Eaton Chalkley, his daughter Mary Ellen, Kitty, Vince, Vincent X. at the Mocambo
One day I told Pop what had happened and how Eaton hadn't caught up to rescue me. Pop basically told me that sometimes people need to count on themselves, instead of waiting for someone else to save them. Then he told me a funny little story about Eaton that nobody else knew... When he and Eaton were about my age, about nine, they were growing up together in Washington D.C. during the First World War. They were playing baseball in the street, when Eaton swatted the ball through a glass window. A mean old fellow came out and demanded to know who did it... Pop and Eaton looked at each other and then looked back at the man. Then, Eaton pointed to my Pop and said, "He did it."
Pop smiled benevolently for some reason, when he told me that story. But the thing that always got me about the stories of them growing up and playing baseball in the blighted streets surrounding the Capitol in the District of Columbia, is that when people invariably questioned how a man with an FBI agent's salary could end up owning a cattle ranch and the local Cadillac dealership in Carrolton, Georgia, the answer always came back that Eaton happended to be from old money, he was a rich kid they said, from a wealthy family down in Georgia.
Me and Eatie.
I'm sporting a pair of rare cufflinks made from black onyx, inlaid with a stylish pink flamingo, that I got to have for only one day.
Eaton and his wife Susan Hayward just got back from a high rolling gambling vacation with Dr. Lee Siegel and his beautiful wife, Noreen Nash. They were treated with unusual respect because everybody thought that Dr. Siegel was Ben Siegel's brother, who was also a Beverly Hills doctor.
The last thing anyone would have suspected was that Eaton was a high level FBI agent, especially because ever since he married Susan, he had really "gone Hollywood" on us, capping his teeth, and working on his tan. We used to kid him about it. But he knew what he was doing. Those were the days when the president of 20th Century Fox was an "ex" F.B.I. agent. And Dr. Lee Siegel wasn't related to Bugsy either. Before his job as the longtime doctor at Fox he was a Marine in charge of the Beverly Hills draft board.
During the Second World War, Jimmy Stewart tried to enlist but failed his exam because he was underweight. Lee told him to go drink a few milkshakes and then he passed.
In the pink
In this shot you can see the ears of a pink coconut cake in the shape of a rabbit. My mother is trying to cheer me up because Pop became angry with Eaton, and it put a bit of a damper on Easter Sunday. You see, the day before, a small package arrived in the mail and it was from the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas. I was curious to see what it was, because I remembered that the things sent from Wilbur Clark at his Desert Inn were always pretty cool.
So the next morning, Easter Sunday, I saw the same wrapping and little pink and black box in the trash, and I picked it up to find a pair of the most elegant cufflinks I've ever seen. They were almost the size of a quarter, a little gaudy, but well made, out of what I recall to have been slate black onyx surrounded by a thin platinum setting, and finely inlaid with a very stylish looking pink flamingo. They were going to be just the perfect thing to compliment my black suit that had pink flecks, and of course my pink and black expansion belt, and, my pink knit tie. But Pop said no. He had thrown them out for a good reason. I asked why, and he said that he did not want to take anything from those guys.
What guys?
"Okay, I will take them then," I probably said, which I did, and I was sporting them when I had my picture taken with Eaton.
Just about that time Pop started in on me again about how the cufflinks were to be thrown out. But Eaton had taken my side and advocated that I should be allowed to keep them. Needless to say, when I took them off and put them away, I never saw them again.
About ten or fifteen years later, I found out why Pop was understandably annoyed by the Flamingo cufflinks. It probably started when Pop first came out to Hollywood and most all the clubs on Sunset Boulevard had a silent partner in the Flamingo's most famous front man Benjamin Siegel. The aversion probably reached its peak later when the Chicago mob's outside man in Vegas was fired for not keeping a low profile and he and a couple of his associates decided it would be a smart idea to shake down one of Pop's acquaintances, Ray Ryan, for what they called "walking around money". According to the stories, Ray allegedly won a lot of money playing cards by the pool at the Flamingo fourteen years earlier, and the person he won it from "Nick the Greek" Dandalos, was all of a sudden claiming he had been cheated.
The hood justified the extortion by saying the game happened on his watch at the Flamingo, when it had really been at a different place. No matter, but the amount of money that changed hands grew with every telling of the story. Finally, Cubby Broccoli put the story into his movie Goldfinger; the part where Goldfinger and James Bond are engaged in a card game by the pool, and Goldfinger receives the names of the cards via a hidden receiver, from an associate with a transmitter and binoculars.
Despite advice not to do it, Pop's acquaintance Ray testified, and got those people locked up. Of course, when they got out after a few years, they went to a meeting with the head of the Chicago outfit, sat in his kitchen, and complained because no one had followed through with the hit they thought should have occurred because of the testimony against them.
Their trouble was that the kitchen had been hardwired by the contractor who worked on the house, and the FBI listened to every word they said. Still, the bureau could not do anything about it because soliciting murder is not necessarily within their jurisdiction. The FBI had been using contractors to wire the houses of selected politicians, criminals and other wrongdoers since the 1930's, and they had to let some crimes take place, rather than alert everybody about the level of surveillance.
More recently, in the 1960's, the sixteen story MCA building at Universal Studios was embedded during construction, to work as a transmitter, and the signals were recorded nearby. But when the FBI hardwired houses of bad guys back in the old days, they often went straight through the phone company, and the recordings were made on spooled wire. They were then transferred to metal discs coated with plastic for the director to hear on a phonograph, and there was a secret room devoted to that, full of those disks, at the old FBI building.
In 1958, when a well meaning local cop stumbled upon a Mafia meeting in Appalachia, New York, the yokels in the press had a field day relating that J. Edgar Hoover was either stupid, cowardly or corrupt for claiming ignorance about organized crime. Many years later, as they became cornered by the Kennedy administration's campaign against organized crime, Lansky and Giancana bolstered their own prestige within the gullible by bragging that they had control of Hoover. They said they had indecent photos of him. Late in life, up to the time he was the victim of a homicide within days of his mandatory testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, Giancana even claimed to have a key on a chain around his neck that would unlock a safe deposit box containing the dirty pictures of Hoover, and incriminating evidence about the CIA's involvement in the Kennedy murders, if anything ever happened to him.
I don't think such photos or hard evidence were ever in his possession, or even existed. But I do think that the dead have no rights, and that anyone can apparently come along and say whatever they want about them. I also know that rather than disclose his methods, and for political reasons, J. Edgar Hoover had to remain relatively silent amidst the perception that he was ignoring the existence of organized crime. When after all, crimes that cross state borders were exactly his bureau's dominion.
Anyway, those were the kinds of thoughts and images that the black and pink Flamingo cufflinks probably unspooled in Pop's mind, and now I know why the sight of them annoyed him.
Everything an adventure
I was about 14 the first time Eaton took me with him for something important. He had to see someone down south. He wanted company for the trip. He told me I'd be spending the day with him. Naturally I wanted to go, because everything with Eaton was always an adventure. Early the next morning, it might have been a weekend, Eaton picked me up and we drove all the way to Mexico. He said he was just going to talk with somebody.
He must have been to the place before, because he had no trouble finding an old white house. He got out of the car. He said he would be back in a few minutes. He left the keys in the ignition, and he said that if he did not come out in 15 minutes I should take off.
That worried me, so I asked him if there was a gun in the car in case there was trouble. He said yes, in the glove box, but he smiled and reassured me that there was not going to be any trouble.
When he came out after about 10 minutes, I was already sitting in the driver's seat. I had the 38 revolver next to me. He smiled with that great confident smile of his, and as he got in the car he said something like "Let's go." So I pulled out and got back onto the main road.
I asked him if he wanted to drive, because I wasn't old enough to have a license, but he let me drive for a while anyway before he took over. I asked him about the spotlight on his side and he showed me how it worked, illuminating rows of houses as we sped back toward L.A.. It made me wonder what all the people might have thought as their bedrooms were lit up.
He was driving faster than I had ever seen, but I did not want to complain. Instead, whenever it started to get to me, I stiffened out my right leg, pressing hard against the floorboard. After a while he noticed, and he asked me, "What are you doing? Putting in the brakes?" I said yes, and he laughed.
So that is the type of info I have about what he was up to. I trust he only went there to talk to the person, and that he wouldn't have brought me into a dangerous situation, because Eaton was great guy. As I grew older, the other things we did like that together were similar, and I learned that Eaton's son Joe, who was a couple of years older, also assisted him in that way. In Eaton's line of work, it was safer for him to go in somewhere if he had someone he could trust waiting outside. That is why it is only remotely possible that someone thought I might know something, and that there might have been a connection between Eaton's work, and what happened to us both on the same day in Rome, when he was poisoned, and I was kidnapped and kept unconscious for three months.
One official explanation for his death was simply hepatitis, based upon the allegation that Eaton and Susan had become heavy drinkers. But I know differently. Susan was a recovered alcoholic, and the Eaton I knew only drank socially. It was just his custom to hold a drink in his hand at a party. He was one of the very highest level FBI guys. He worked out. He was fit. He was always sharp and aware of everything around him.
Admittedly, he was devastated, in the year before his own death, when he lost his only son Joe whose airplane crashed into a low mountain in broad daylight. It was the same way Dean Martin's son Dino was killed. Eaton's grief for Joe, on top of the pressure of his work in the aftermath of the JFK murder, was difficult to bear, and as a result he did have a drink or two more than usual, much in the way I noticed Kenny O'Donnell, Jim Cantillion, Johnny Roselli and others using alcohol to momentarily release themselves from the ever present prospects of a grim and uncertain reality. But if Eaton suddenly started drinking heavily and then died all within one year from hepatitis, which he didn't, it was "fast acting hepatitis".
Whew, I can't wait until I attract enough name recognition and my campaign starts to catch fire so I can delete the last few paragraphs and most of the other National Enquirer type items...
I have seen it written by authors with 4th hand knowledge that Eaton contracted hepatitus when he was in the Army. But Eaton was never in the Army. Besides how would anyone know when and where someone contracted hepatitis? I've seen people die from hepatitis. It is a gradual process of deterioration. They do not appear fit and healthy one day and then suddenly keel over in critical condition. In any event, Susan had a painfully credible account of why and how Eaton was killed, and I was the only one I knew at the time, who believed it.
Of course, I am aware it appears I am trying to insert my own story in the middle of a sinister scenario, or as you will read, within the time frame of people who knew too much about the Kennedy assassins. You might even think I am seeking notoriety, or that I am paranoid. However, all this happened a very long time ago. I had never been involved in any "bizarre" problems up to that time. I have not been involved in any problems since then. It was the only time in my life I have ever missed work. I feel better now that I am publishing it, because someday someone else might contact me and tell me what they saw happen from their own perspective. And by the way, I did not ask to be affected by the Kennedy killings, and neither did you. But we have all been profoundly affected by what happened, whether we realize it, and whether we were alive then, or not.
In this photo: FBI target signed by the director
Eaton used to take me with him sometimes, when he wanted to brush up on his target practice, either at his ranch in Sleepy Hollow Georgia, or in the basement of the old bureau building. This is the bottom of a target I shot up using one of the FBI's prohibition era round mag tommy guns. The director autographed it for me. It is one of the things I kept with me during my journey, and as such it's in poor condition. Most all the other photos and memorabilia were kept by my mother, and by friends who have helped me reconstruct my past.
True mission of lawmen
I'd like to point out that is my Pop's old badge, and not mine. And that's not an apology, because I have my own old badge. Besides, this is just one of many deputy badges that Sheriff Peter Pitichess issued. Frank Sinatra even had one, only a few badge numbers removed. But I just had a friend tell me he could never be friends with a cop. I mentioned this to a closer friend and she said, "Well you don't want to be friends with those kinds of people anyway."
But I do. Just think about reaching the people who have found no justice in the judicial system, or who have been gobbled up by banks and insurance corporations, and who don't vote because they think it is useless.
It did not help public confidence any to learn that voting machines and the central tabulation machine itself can be reprogrammed within seconds by anyone with a standard key and a flash drive, to skew results any desired way. In its current damage control effort of 2009, Premier Election Solutions, formerly Diebold Election Systems, the main manufacturer (or culprit if you will), of voting machines changed its name, and was then sold to its competitor ES&S. Apparently a new name on the box is intended to provide some comfort for those who heard the rumors.
My point here is that things are never hopeless. Aside from often having no real choice between the lesser of two evils between the Republican and Democratic tickets, the backbone of the voting process still comes down to the people controlling each individual polling place, and there are still plenty of people who have integrity. There are still people in law enforcement and public service, who have morals, who joined not only for the adventure of it, but because they are patriotic and were brought up to believe in the freedoms of America.
True, there are instances where some of them have resigned themselves to tell a lie, or resigned when told to lie, or when faced with dishonorable assignments. But many of them are fortunate to be working in places where they have been able to use their influence to help people. What bothers me, is the current domination of the inhuman, bankster hierarchy, government policy making corporatocracy, and military bureaucracy, and a U.S. Congress that will incur any liabilities whatsoever to increase their own job security for the wealth and power of a few, the least of which are the consequences of the enslavement and suffering of people and nations. That kind of inhumane logic at the highest levels is bound to be a detriment and a deterrent to the direction of the true mission of lawmen and public servants.
Political ambitions started early
The greatest man
I once knew a gentleman who was one of the most stalwart individuals. He was the greatest man. That is what Rocky Marciano called him. His family was poor, but he put himself through college on football scholarships, quitting Knute Rockne's Fighting Irish to become the co-captain at Marquette, a smaller school in Milwaukee that offered a proper Journalism degree.
He roamed the gridiron like a deer, and no NFL player ever had a surer pair of hands or a more acute sense of direction when it came to pulling down a long over the shoulder pass. He was alleged to have received enough higher education at Marquette, but never enough beer, for Milwaukee was more of a small prohibition era town in those days. And when a local policeman brutalized someone, he stood up for the person, was forced to defend himself, and somehow found responsible for the cop leaving without his badge. More cops returned, but when a couple of his team mates assisted him, the same thing happened. Soon, his team mate Kenny Wendt, later a Cook County Circuit Court Judge, had a collection of several badges inside his desk drawer.
Broke, during the depths of the Great Depression, he put himself in a position to be chosen by President Roosevelt as one of the first White House correspondents. He had a speech impediment, but he made up for that with his writing, unearthing many a deserving scoundrel in moments of spade calling. And when he when he broke a story, it was always the untinctured truth, told with the zeal of a man who had struck purest gold.
When the Second World War came, he received the incredible assignment of traveling with all the top generals as a war correspondent, but he was also employed as a secret observer for the White House. It was his suggestion that changed the color of the Air Force uniform from khaki to blue. That is the kind of influence he had.
After the war, W.R. Hearst paid him more than the national editor to write a syndicated column that ran on page A2 in all the major US cities. He also covered local sports in Los Angeles, to which he brought major league baseball. Powerful people from diverse walks of life such as Louis B. Mayer, Howard Hughes, or President Kennedy listened to what he had to say and sought to call him their friend.
There will never be another like him, because there can never exist the same set of uncanny circumstances that propelled him to his uniquely influential position, at a time when there was no internet, no comprehensive TV news, and when newspapers did most all of the advertising in the world. As Rocky said, he was just the greatest man. He was the greatest because when fate captured him amidst an array of never-to-be-repeated adversities and opportunities, and catapulted him within their grasp, he was able to rise to the occasion. He was a helluva guy. He was a wonderful old sonuvagun. He was my Pop.
The magnificent Ray Ryan
One day when I just was a little kid, Ray telephoned our house out of the blue. He said he was on his way over.
"Where the hell did we put that picture of Ray?," Pop exclaimed as he frantically rummaged for it around the house.
"What picture?...," my mother was saying.
"The portrait of himself. The one he sent us!"
It turned out Ray was an acquaintance who Pop avoided because he was a high stakes gambler who had become the subject of a well publicized extortion attempt by the mob, and early in his career the gangster Frank Costello had purchased shares in one of the many oil fields he drilled and leased. But Ray was primarily just an extremely successful oilman. After the death of President Roosevelt, Mike O'Reilly, the president's trusted chief of the White House Secret Service detail, had come to work for him. Nevertheless, Pop was very strict about with whom he associated, so Ray's portrait had found its place in a closet. But on this day, Pop found the portrait, and an over-sized nail with which to hang it, just in time. He had no sooner hammered the nail into the wall, hung the picture to the left of the fireplace where it looked a bit out of place, and was straightening it, just as Ray Ryan rang the door bell.
Ray Ryan in the lobby of his magnificent El Mirador Hotel
For a short time after military school I convinced my parents to let me go to public school where I could interact with all different kinds of people... and girls.
One evening when I was 15, and staying at Ray's El Mirador Hotel, I proudly mentioned to him that I was going on a date. Unbeknownst to Ray, it was my first date, and at that age, for me, it meant meeting an older girl in front of the movie theater. I don't remember how I expected to get there. But Ray told me to go ahead and take his convertible. I was floored he was giving me so much responsibility, and I'll never forget the feeling I had that night driving down Palm Canyon Drive in Ray's new silver Lincoln Continental with black leather seats, and the top down, with my date by my side... In those days, from Palm Springs you could see every star in the sky.
I looked a little young to be behind the wheel, we had even tried a little beer and some wine, when the cops pulled us over and took us in to the station. Then, I heard one of them say "That car belongs to Ray Ryan!" The watch commander made a phone call, and then he came over and apologized, gave me back the keys, and told me to drive safely. What a privilege it was to drive Ray's new Lincoln.
After I dropped off my girlfriend at Indian Wells, I hurried back to the El Mirador. I did not want to be out too late and make Ray worry. After all, I wanted to use that car again. So I floored it on one of those long dark stretches of road where in those days there used to be no cross streets and no lights.
I suppose one of my wheels caught the shoulder, because I momentarily lost control and scraped up the whole right side of the car. When I got back I was ashamed of myself. I told Ray what had happened. He said to me, "Don't worry about it. It's only a car."
Ray was the best liked person in Palm Springs. Those were the old days when if a person was pulled over who had been drinking, the cops would drive them home, but today everything is more strict.
Above: Clark Gable, Kay Spreckles Gable, Ray Ryan, Charles O'Curran, Patti Page, Vincent X., William Gargan
Here is our friend, Ray Ryan, back in the days when you could be an oilman and still be cool. ; )
Ray didn't inherit his money. And he didn't care for some of those other oil millionaires from Texas, like one of J. Edgar Hoover's oil drilling pals, a business associate of Carlos Marcello and Vito Genovese, who used to walk around Washington D.C. pretending to be a cowboy in his five hundred dollar high heeled boots. Ray instead, was a hands on oil drilling guy, and a gambler who struck it rich.
The problem with things going down in history is that a lot of the time historians get it wrong. I did not do the "Twist" in the Persian Room with Kay Gable.
I was just a little child when I first met J. Edgar Hoover, but I have been to his home, and I have some recollections, and through Pop's stories I have been taken back to a time when Pop and Eaton grew up within a few blocks of him. Knowing we all view things from different perspectives, I hope you will not be offended if I, without defending Hoover, have a slightly different view than what has been established in the public mind today.
John Edgar Hoover was the same age as my Pop's eldest brother Jim. In the days when the Civil War was just a recent memory and Hoover was a teenager; my Pop and Eaton were little children. On those hot summer days, in central Washington, District of Columbia, at Doc Geiger's drugstore corner, where they used to hang out, some of the local slobs used to come around wearing undershirts, or no shirt at all. But J. Edgar Hoover would show up wearing a blazer and slacks. He always had a fresh haircut and a manicure, and his shoes were always shined.
Well, that was it - obviously just a small thing. But I may be the only one that knew that, and without accusing or defending Hoover of the publicized human rights violations or alleged crimes at the end of his career against young radicals, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, Jean Seberg and others who he believed posed a threat to his vision for America, or his continued employment and protection, I think it gives a glimpse of this a man from another place in time, who grew up within the public mentality of the First World War, and who started out with a discipline, a patriotism, and a strong desire to better himself and do something for his country.
Later, around 1933, Pop and Eaton helped the young man that I have just described put the FBI on the road to becoming the finest secret police force the world has ever seen. But that is a longer story.
When I was a youngster, I joined the subject of the above FBI letter, Ray Ryan, along with my Pop, on a fishing trip to Alaska. When I was about 12, I was privileged to accompany Ray and his friends to his new Safari Club in East Africa. One summer, I traveled with him and his family through Europe and on to Africa. A couple of years later he arranged for me to work on a game reserve where I learned to shoot with a Mauser rifle and scope among other things. A few years after that, he took me with him on an itinerary through Switzerland, France, Italy, and then to Kenya where we stayed for a while, before returning home through Addis Ababa, Rome and then London.
On my visits to the Mount Kenya Safari Club I got to meet people like General Jimmy Stewart, Lord Louis Mountbatten, Francesco Fulci, the Italian Counsel to Moscow, Vice President Lyndon Johnson and Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands. I saw former President Eisenhower too, who remembered me from when I accompanied Pop to his place at Gettysburg. I was also friends with William Holden, Ray's partner who helped front out the image of the club, while the silent partner was Carl Hirshman, the Zurich banker who among other things contracted to build jets for l'Armee de l'Air.
Bill Holden, Ray Ryan, Charles O'Curran and some of their friends, one of the first times I traveled with Ray.
All time record
Since I've mentioned Bill Holden, I would like you to know that he has my everlasting esteem for holding the all time record for a person who could stay in the hottest possible sauna for the longest possible period of time. Those who were not forewarned of Bill, the sauna champ, were in for a rare experience when he walked in and turned the heat up to the max, and then began throwing water on the rocks until even the most stalwart of individuals picked up their towels and fled amidst outbursts of panicked disbelief. Then, he would stay inside there by himself for up to an hour...! Other unwitting individuals who happened to be on their way to have a sauna, opened the door, were hit with blast furnace heat, and quickly retreated. I witnessed this phenomenon not only at the Safari Club in Kenya, but at Ray's El Mirador Hotel in Palm Springs. It got so bad that when Bill showed up in the sauna... everyone who knew what was coming next immediately left.
Just another spoiled elitist
At any rate, when I was at the Safari Club a couple of years later, the place was a little empty, and one night, a lonely novelist by the name of Robert Ruark, who had written the bestseller Something of Value, the tale of the Mau Mau uprising, asked me to join him for dinner. I vividly remembered reading his book that described when the Kenya Regiment was taking the land back from the Mau Mau, and how they found the heads of one local family neatly arranged inside their piano. The novel had been even more alarming inasmuch as I had chosen to finish reading it while I was spending the night alone in a little trench with a corrugated metal roof on a game reserve in the middle of nowhere. So, when I joined Ruark for dinner, I expected to gain a better understanding of Kenya, from this writer who had chronicled the massacre of just about every white settler in the area. I wanted to know if Jomo Kenyatta helped the Kikuyu to settle the Mau Mau grievances, or if that was even the way it went down.
Instead, during dinner, Ruark proceeded to mimic my Pop's speech affliction and asked me, "Does he s.. s... s... s... st... still, s... s.., s... s... st... st... stutter?" No wonder this guy didn't have anyone to dine with, I thought to myself, regretting that it's often too late when I think of something clever to do to a turkey like that.
But the next year I visited the club, and I got to know Ruark a bit better. He was a drinker. He was known to have joined Ernest Hemingway in a bout or two with the bottle wherein they both became convinced they were somehow tougher and more clever than they actually were. I had heard the story about how Pop had been forced to deck Hemingway after they had gone to a bar in Paris during the Second World War, and Pop wound up standing between Hemingway - who liked to wear a 45 caliber sidearm even though none of the other war correspondents did - and a much smaller frenchman with whom Hemmingway had picked a fight. And so it was in that general perspective I later realized that Ruark's lame remark at dinner had not come out of him because he was mean spirited. It was simply because he was drunk.
Anyhow, the last time I was at the Mount Kenya Safari Club, I had another experience that wasn't exactly the coolest either. Ray was back in the states. It was supposedly off season and the place was dead. But I wondered if there even was a season, because the only time I ever saw the place full was when all the big shots like Lord Louis Mountbatten, Francesco Fulci, the Italian Counsel to Moscow, Vice President Lyndon Johnson, Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands, President Dwight Eisenhower, future Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and Carl Hirshman, the Swiss banker, appeared to be having some sort of a convention.
That was the summer I spent most days helping on the game reserve, and even back then the whole existence of wildlife in East Africa existed at the sole discretion of the government. It wasn't a place where rich folks could just come and shoot any number of trophy animals. The lion, the water buffalo, the beisa oryx, all of them, appeared to exist, and still do today but in much lesser numbers, as kind of a floorshow for the tourists, and their numbers are controlled in relation to one another by the issuance of permits to hunters, or by capture for sale to international zoos. Kind of the way in which civilization itself is controlled in fictional novels like George Orwell's 1984.
At any rate, on one particularly slow night, after accompanying a young guest of the club, and a former Mau Mau "general" who guided us in tracking down a wounded animal, I showered and changed into my blazer and slacks, and went down to the lobby. It was deserted. In the lounge there were no women, only a few soldiers and their Sergeant Major from the remnants of the Kenya Regiment, laughing and drinking at the end of the empty bar.
I was a green kid, and the garrulous Sergeant Major had no trouble convincing me that he would give me a large denomination note if I allowed him to put the note against my forearm and burn a hole through it with his cigarette. So I placed my forearm on the bar, and we all drank beer while the jerk kept the cigarette on the note, taking a few puffs every now and then to keep it hot. But it did not make a hole in the note. The trick was that the arm absorbs all the heat, and the cigarette will burn a big hole in one's arm before it ever burns through the note.
Still, I could have withstood the pain indefinitely, in my youthful interest to become a man of courage, but it finally dawned on me that I had been had, and the soldiers all had a great big laugh. The next night, after work, I put on my blazer over my bandaided arm, and I again went downstairs to the lounge to see if there was any action. But the place was still dead. Soon, those same soldiers arrived, but the Sergeant Major's arm was in a cast. I asked him what had happened, and he said he had a car accident. I might have believed him, if his whole attitude toward me had not changed immensely. He was extremely humble, and was falling all over himself apologizing for his conduct the night before. It was obvious to me that someone had taken it upon himself to ensure that guests of the club were treated politely.
Now that might sound like something that could have happened in Vegas doesn't it? But not necessarily so. Those were the days following the bloody Mau Mau uprising, before photo safari Africa, and the people who went there to keep the peace did so. And while killers might have a history of achieving faster results than large armies, I eventually came to learn that Ray Ryan on the other hand was able to maintan peace with only a few suitcases of money to the beleaguered administration of Jomo Kenyatta.
About ten years later, Ray mentioned he was aware of what had happened to the thuggish Sergeant Major. He said that if he had been present, things would have been handled differently. Meanwhile, purportedly because of Ray's testimony against a few Mafiosi (United States v. John Marshall (aka Marshal Caifano) and Charles Del Monico ), and more likely as a follow up to the threats that he would have I.R.S. trouble if he testifed against them at all, rumors surfaced about suitcases of cash that accompanied him on his travels. By December 1963, someone high in Washington D.C. had pretty much given the go-ahead through Ramsay Clark for the government to start spending an unlimited amount of taxpayer money on FBI and IRS task forces to investigate Ray. Files were built. Some theorized he might be hiding income, or laundering casino skim for the mob, which he was not. Others speculated he was moving government money for the CIA, and that he built the Bermuda Dunes airstrip with CIA money, and the first meeting between William Harvey and other CIA agents, and the mob, to discuss the assassination of Fidel Castro, had occured right there at the new airfield. Subpoenas were issued for among other things, the production of records from Ryan Enterprises, as well as the Mount Kenya Safari Club, and ultimately..., Ray was indicted!
Next, in the United States v. Ryan a federal judge found Ray guilty of contempt and obstruction of justice for destroying subpoenaed records, after his secretary testified that Ray had ordered her to erase the name of Frank Erickson, the world's largest bookmaker, and 23 other individuals, from the membership records of his Mount Kenya Safari Club. And it was somewhat true, Ray did travel sometimes with suitcases of cash. I was about 16 when I first saw him gamble, losing over $100,000 one night at baccarat, in a private room, sitting next to a french actress named Simone Simone, at a place called the Old Beach Club on the south coast of France. For him it was business. But $100,000 was an average night for Raymond. He used to physically train for the bigger games, throwing and catching a thing called a medicine ball, and punching a couple of different size bags that hung behind a bungalow at his Palm Springs El Mirador Hotel.
Anyway, on that particular night at the Old Beach Club, I must have been making him nervous because he gave me a stack of chips and told me to go have a good time. So I went to the craps table in the main room, and began betting with the house, tipping the croupier every time I won. There was a high roller with an entourage, and an elegant lady at his side, dominating the other end of the table. She was cheering him on amid great hoopla. But he was losing big-time, and I of course was betting against him, and winning. Finally, with great show, he made his way over to my side of the table, and gave me an desperately ominous look like I must have been the worst anathema to befall the ancient game of dice since Centurions gambled for the cloak of Jesus Christ. He pulled his cash out, held it up at chest height, and then slowly, deliberately, with his arms outstretched, began making a show of counting the bills one by one, from one hand to the other, right in front of me.
I still had most of my chips out on the table covering the all the bets everyone had made, but what this fellow was doing gave me an uncomfortable feeling. I got the hint that maybe it might be a good time to go outside and get some fresh air. So I just casually walked away, and let everything it ride. When I came back inside, the croupier ran up to me. He filled my two hands with chips, and explained how all my bets had come in. The high roller was busted. He was not too happy about it either.
But even though I won, and was feeling pretty high, I later heard that Ray told my Pop I acted like I did not understand the value of money. Ray was right. In my youthful attempt to act like I was a smooth operator, I had tried to appear cool, and rich, like a player in the movies. Instead, I had conveyed the impression that I was just another spoiled American elitist; exactly the kind of people I actually dislike. But I was only in high school, and I had not yet learned that the more people you try to impress to think you are cool and love you, the more people there might be who will dislike you for it.
Didn't trust banks
Over the years, after Ray gained Pop's respect by testifying against the mob, his status gradually changed from being an acquaintance, to a good friend, a friend who appreciated the power of hard cash. He even used to have pads made up out of new hundred dollar bills; laminated at one end in the same color as the bills, so they looked like they came from the U.S. Treasury that way, and he would just peel them off. He liked to deal in fresh cash, bundles of it... because as a survivor of the so-called Great Depression, he just didn't trust banks.
He was a high stakes cash gambler, the tops, and that was how he knew Frank Erickson, the king of the national bookmaking wire..., and as far as the 23 mysterious names that Ray had removed from the membership roster of the Mount Kenya Safari Club, the reason the court had held him in contempt and convicted him of obstruction? Well, they turned out to be a cross section of powerful people. At least three of the individuals from New York it is true, were established as the leaders of the New York and New Jersey Cosa Nostra, but the list also included prominent industrialists, international bankers, presidents and prime ministers, and some of America's most famous politicians.
As it turned out, Frank Erickson, the world's largest bookmaker, had bought memberships in the Safari Club as gifts for people, some of whom were in the Mafia. But the memberhip also included one former and one future president of the United States, and soon after the names came out,
the court of appeals ruled in Ray's favor
and exonerated him of the charges.
Justice was served, but not in deference to the powerful world leaders on the list. No, Raymond received Justice because he had actually chosen to remove the members names for confidentiality purposes. He was protecting the membership of a foreign club in Africa that included President Eisenhower, Winston Churchill, Prince Bernhard of The Netherlands, Walt Disney, Henry Ford, Jimmy Stewart, Lyndon Johnson, and others, and he had removed the mafia related members whose memberships Erickson had purchased, long before he knew he would be indicted, and way before the records were ever subpoenaed.
Raymond was proven to be a right guy after all. But the damage had been done. He could not gamble in the big card games he loved anymore, because every time he did, the I.R.S. thought he won a lot more than he had. Moreover, the I.R.S. investigation compromised many of the worthwhile things he did in the public interest. For the rest of his life, two I.R.S. agents worked on nothing else but whatever they could find out about Ray Ryan, and they did it on the taxpayer's dime.
Pop's initial concern about him had come true, because Ray's love of cards, and gambling's proximity to the mob, had resulted in a disparagement of his character, and that was leading the two well meaning investigators to questions about other people in high places. But wait a second, while they were focused on the idea that Frank Erickson bought club memberships for Mafiosi, did anyone else hear the sound of something big I thought I had heard fall in the forest? I wanted to know who purchased all the other memberships. Who purchased the memberships for Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson for instance? Who was powerful enough to pick up their tabs?
In 1951, under the flag of heading off inflation, the private bankers who control the Federal Reserve embarked upon a restrictive money policy and began raising interest rates. This is the same thing the Federal Reserve did in 2007. Predictably, it caused a recession. America became so broke that we couldn't even afford to send our athletes to the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinky, Finland. Senators and congressmen outdid themselves in finding new ways to blame each other's political parties for the deplorable state of affairs. But since the politicians could not profit from it, no kind of help was forthcoming from the federal government.
It came down to the private sector to make things right, and so Pop enlisted his friends in the broadcasting industry, and produced a fundraising telethon that ran on all networks simultaneously. It was the first national telethon, and the largest networking in history at the time.
Pop was given many awards and plaques. Sometimes he was offered cash or gifts for the things he did, or things that people wanted him to do. But he only accepted gifts from friends. He accepted a tea service, for instance, from Joe Kennedy because Kennedy had previously come to our house and was accustomed to having tea round 4:00 pm, but we were fresh out.
He accepted a lifetime supply of not-for-sale Schick razors from his friend Pat Frawley because apparently Frawley had too many of them. It was a new kind of razor that took a long time to get dull, and it would have put razor blade companies out of business.
One night Pop was at a club called The Daisy when Mike Todd had his wife Elizabeth Taylor ask him to dance with her. While they were on the dance floor she slipped a watch, a gift from Mike, into his coat pocket, and he did not notice it until he got home. Todd had a flair for doing things. He was a showman. Whenever he had a press party it was more like a high end champagne brunch. He really knew how to lay it on.
Stuff Pop did not accept:
When I was small I went with him to a ball game at the Coliseum where somebody swiped the hub caps from his brand new Cadillac convertible, one of the cars Eaton drove out here from his dealership in Carrolton Georgia. A few days later I heard Pop yell at someone over the phone,
"You get those things off my car right now you son-of-a-bitch."
"Who was that?" I asked.
Pop said, "It was a guy named Mickey Cohen."
I asked, "Who is Mickey Cohen?"
And Pop said he was just a small time wanna be hood, or something to that effect. Which was true. Cohen had called him up and asked him to look out the window because he had taken care of putting new hub caps on the wheels.
By the end of the day, the hub caps were gone from the car again. When I got older, I realized that the real syndicate guys did not seek notoriety by playing the role like Cohen, who once bombed his own ice cream parlor to collect insurance and attract publicity. They worked behind the scenes. They even ran legitimate businesses, and others like finance companies... and banks.
More stuff Pop did not accept:
Back when Earl Warren was campaigning for governor, there was a politically instigated campaign to ban horseracing in California. They said the mob was involved with everything from fixing the union deals to the winners of the races. They said that certain jockeys conspired to hold other horses back and let others win. Not to mention the illegal bookmaking. The litany of grievances was long and true.
But Pop was friends with people in racing who were against those kinds of things. Big people in racing, like Dan and Ada Rice, Liz Whitney, and Ben Lindheimer who owned the two tracks in Chicago. It was Lindheimer who had financed the campaign for the Governor of Illinois. Now a lot of people who simply equate Chicago wth gangsters might think that Lindheimer for instance, and the whole sport had to be crooked. But Lindheimer was a stand up guy who kept the Chicago mob at bay.
Pop was also good friends with Jackie Westrope, the most winning jockey. I remember visiting Westrope and his lovely wife and daughters at their little ranch style house on the southeast corner of Whitier and Sunset in the heart of Beverly Hills. The opposition to horseracing got so bad that the commissioners bowed to the pressure and banned Jack Westrope from racing because he was winning too much.
Jackie Westrope and Vincent X.
But Westrope was the last jockey they needed to sit down. He was one of those who didn't go along with the fixes. Sadly, one day at Hollywood Park, coming out of the club house turn and into the home stretch, he was killed, when by accounts his horse fell after being crowded into the rail.
At any rate, besides being one of the people who helped keep mobsters off the track, Jack Westrope genuinely enjoyed the sport. He knew everything about horses. He was like Pop who loved going there every Saturday with his friend Dr. Lee Siegel. I don't blame them. It wasn't like the races today. Everything at the track and inside the club was high tech and brand spanking new. The horses were treated extremely well. The jockeys, all athletes, seemed like terrific guys.
I was a little kid, but I developed a special betting system that appeared to work. I studied the way the horses acted when they were brought out into the paddock, paying reference to the favorites and the long shots. I could spot the ones who looked sluggish and the ones who were frisky and raring to go. Then, I compared my information with the odds on the racing form and came up with my picks. Not exactly rocket science. But several adults laughed and praised me for being intuitive, and Jimmy Durante, Joe E. Lewis the comedian with the scarred face for playing the wrong club, and J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, all made money on my tips. It's true.
Anyway, Pop put on a campaign in the papers. The politicians backed off, and horse racing was kept alive in California. In return for that, The Thoroughbred Horseman's Protective Association gave him a dinner, and surprised him with a Rolls Royce.
He couldn't take the Rolls because of his ethics, but he kept the key chain as a momento. Late in his life, when things were tough, he used to look at that Rolls Royce key chain. He said that if there was one thing he ever regretted turning down, it would have been that car.
Vincent X. and Marilyn Monroe
Eaton Chalkley and Susan Hayward.
Whenever Eaton came out to California he always wanted to be fixed up with actresses, but when Pop introduced him to Susan it was special.
Mr. and Mrs. Casey Stengel, Mr. and Mrs. Joe DiMaggio, Frank Leahy, Mack Millar, Bob and Dolores Hope, Vincent X.
Al Weil, Mickey Walker, Rocky Marciano, Vincent X.
Mayor Norris Poulson, Vincent X. Flaherty, Walter O'Malley, Mervyn LeRoy
Pop noticed that L.A. ought to have a major league baseball team. He started promoting the idea in his columns. But Mayor Poulson and other narrow minded L.A. politicians, with the exception of Kenneth Hahn, felt that having the minor league Angels was good enough.
Finally, after campaigning for over a decade he personally persuaded Walter O'Malley to move the Brooklyn Dodgers to L.A.
He did not ask anything in return for his efforts, but was dismayed to see Mayor Poulson, Rosalind Wyman and the other politicians jump on the bandwagon at the very end and take all the credit for it.
If you go on Wikipedia it will tell you how it was Mayor Poulson's great acheivement. But that's the way the mop flops.
Supervisor Kenny Hahn, on Pop's right, was the only L.A. politician who cared to recognize that California deserved major league baseball franchises. Hahn assisted Pop in his campaign for a number of years, until 1954 when the City Council finally voted in favor of it, O'Malley and the other owners started to see it their way, and the rest of L.A.'s politicians pretended they had been pushing for it all along.
If it's in print, it must be true.
Vincent X., Milton Berle, Art Linkletter, and Carl Sandburg
If it's in print, it must be true.
This is one of the many syndicated front page articles that Pop wrote to help JFK obtain the Democratic nomination, and later the presidency.
Pop's friend William Randolph Hearst favored the Democrats, and the editors of his newspapers did not make much secret of their political intentions either, until about 1935 when Hearst decided America would be better served by a different president. But separation of the press and the state has historically been largely a myth, no matter how impartial news organizations and the journalists that work for them claim to be. Take for instance the Los Angeles Examiner's competitor, The Los Angeles Times, during the campaigns of the 50's and 60's. The Times always had several high level Republican operatives, and at least one lobbyist on their payroll.
Nosce te ipsum
When I first got back to the States, amnesia, resulting from an injury I sustained in Italy, caused me to become a lot more introspective in trying to figure out who I really was. I was not sure if I was the same person described on my own passport. The picture looked like me. But I remembered none of it. I did not remember my friends. And it did not help any that when I visited my parents they were living at a different place than the house I thought I remembered before I left. But then, I did not initially remember any of that either. I was not even sure if they were my parents.
Gradually, over a period of years, things like the column Pop had written about my political ideas reminded me, and memories about my trips overseas started coming back. But sometimes, I wondered if I picked up these memories somehow else. I wondered if the memories were real, or if they were only partially real, or a fabrication of my imagination.
Take for instance something that happened when I was 16, when my car caught fire in front of school. It was not my first car to catch fire in front of school... It was just the second car I owned, and it happened to catch fire in front of school, right in front of a place called the upper patio, where the scholars, athletes, sharp kids, and their clubs, hung out.
When I first remembered it about ten years ago, the version went something like this: The beginning of the school day apparently consisted of arriving at school and seeing who had the coolest car and the best looking girl. It was not good enough for the most obsessive to merely arrive and go to class. They had to circle the school several times.
My fuel line may have been leaking because I had just installed the most carburetors possible, and the timing was a little off, causing backfires. As a matter of fact, I am a little ashamed to tell you that I punched it, and then deliberately let the car back off so that the kids in the upper patio would notice as I went by. What a jerk. That was me?
I attracted attention all right. But the motor burst into flames. I had to stop right in front of everybody and pop the hood to save the candy green paint. Yes, candy green. I tried to smother the flames with my jacket to no avail. Then some kid ran up with a 5 gallon pail of slurry from a construction job and threw that on the engine. Next, someone slammed the hood back down, but that did not put out the fire either. It only raised basketball sized bubbles in the once cherry green paint. And what did I supposedly do while all that was going on? Well, I didn't know what to do. So in order to save face I pulled out my comb and started combining my hair, slowly, and deliberately. You see, long hair was a big deal. That was the year I would not be on the football team because the coach insisted I get a crew cut. It was a human rights issue. The rights of man. Dig?
And that is what I thought I remembered happening. How could I have been such a lout? It was not until about five years ago that I ran into someone that I do not believe I have ever met, and he said something like "Vince Flattery, man I thought you would be dead by now! I will never forget the time your car burned up in front of school and you stood there and combed your hair". How do I feel? My point here is that keeping the destruction of a material object like a car, in perspective, and trying to have grace under pressure, may not always appear to be good concepts, when the only youthful experiences you have to emulate are ones from the movies.
Vincent X. Flaherty, Vince Flaherty, President Harry S. Truman, the first and hopefully the last leader to ever order a nuclear attack.
We're standing in the driveway at Ed Pauley's house next to the bus with a bar, a bartender, and a band, that took us every New Years Day to the Rose Bowl.
I suppose I'm one of the very few that know this these days, but among other things, Ed was the oilman chiefly responsible for creating the countries and the borders in the Mid East after the Second World War. Ed also controlled the money that went in and out of the Democratic National Committee, and it was Ed that put Harry in office for his second term.
Subsequently, Harry appointed Ed as the Under Secretary of the Navy. And I know that the notion of one man, or a group of men, being powerful enough to put a president in office, sounds repugnant. But it happens all the time. Nevertheless, it would have been extremely difficult to find a wiser man for the job than Ed Pauley. He did the right thing, and so did Harry Truman. Those were different circumstances when the world was a larger, somewhat less educated place. For instance, Truman's atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended a war that would have been fought to the last man, and saved thousands of American and Japanese lives, while the radioactive contamination and blowback over the jet stream to the United states contained only a fraction, a fraction, of the radiation that the United States and Japan have incurred thus far from the Fukushima nuclear energy plant tragedy. Given what we now know about the serious environmental consequences of nuclear weapons, even though the bombing of civilian populations was practiced by all nations participating in World War II, the perpetrators of any such acts today should be brought to trial as war criminals.
With regard to Ed Pauley's politics, I suppose he might have controlled the nations political funding no matter what party was in power. He was fundamentally neither a Democrat nor a Republican. Together, with his Office of Strategic Services friend Allen Dulles, he reallocated the assets of the defeated Axis powers and helped achieve stability after the war. His oil corporations later joined with those of the Bush family, and many of the familiar oil distribution corporations today such as Penzoil, owe their existence to Pauley. But as I mentioned before, those were much different times, and were he alive today it would prove invaluable to have Ed Pauley's clear headed thinking toward getting the evil and drunken oil genie back inside its bottle.
The memories associated with the days when this team picture was taken are vague.
But I recall six of those young football men were in my group, the Sovereigns W.L.A.
In this photo: A souvenir for a Sovereign, my Perkiomen School pin, and the cufflinks Charlie Morrison left to my Pop.
While most columnists avoided writing articles that unearthed scoundrels, Pop did not. He and the Hearst organization were sued when he divulged the Howard Hughes Paramount Studios fraud. He was
sued by a boxer named Lou Nova
whose performance he characterized as cowardly, and by others. For this reason he got to know several attorneys.
I don't know where he met Richard H. Cantillon, but the elderly Mr. Cantillon must have been an attorney since the beginning of time, at least since the uncomplicated time when attorneys practiced both Civil and Criminal law. One day I spoke up about something Cantillon had said and he laid right into me. So I stood up for myself. "No I'm not," I said, and with that he launched into me again, telling me who I was, and what I was, with a stream of well chosen adjectives. He had me realizing all of a sudden in his eloquent way, that he might very well be able to persuade someone else that I was all of the things he called me. So when Pop one day suggested I ought to be an attorney, I didn't think I wanted to do it, if it meant treating people like that.
At any rate, Cantillon had two boys, Michael and James, who he envisioned following in his footsteps at his Beverly Hills law firm. But James was not so sure what he wanted to do. He was a handsome young Irishman, with jet black hair, and blue eyes. He was a good dresser, always well groomed, and the young ladies really liked him. He liked young ladies too, and sports cars, and he liked them fast.
So it was not before long the elder Cantillon sent James away to a prep school called Perkiomen in north western Pennsylvania. Perkiomen had a terrific faculty and somehow it did the trick for his son, who went on to graduate law school with honors. At that point, the elder Cantillon got his wish. R. Michael Cantillon took up the Civil Law practice of the firm, and James P. Cantillon chose to specialize in Criminal Law because it was more exciting, and the firm was renamed Cantillon, Cantillon and Cantillon, kind of a play on words about their respect for the attorney client privilege.
I suppose I'll be getting some newer pictures soon...
In the meantime here is one of my favorites.
I still look like this though.
When Pop started working for JFK and his people as a speechwriter, he decided it would be good for me to accompany them on the campaign trail through New York and Pennsylvania. So he pulled me out of school in Los Angeles. He had also decided that what had been good for James Cantillon, who had turned out great, would be good for me too. So he enrolled me at Perkiomen.
I did well there scholastically. I was a first string end on the football team. My new best friends were the center and the quarterback. But then Pop took me out of there because, for some reason, he wanted me in another school, Malvern Prep. One of our first games was against Perkiomen, and we beat them so badly that my friend, their center, was in tears. He didn't even acknowledge me.
Pop, me, and one of his best friends Shirley Povich, waiting for clearance in the lobby of Tom O'Donnell's so we could get into the luncheon with the president.
When this photo was taken I had been going to schools on the east coast for a couple of years. JFK even attended two of them. I got an education, that's for sure. But I didn't feel like I belonged there, in part, because many of my school mates came from well established families that were extremely wealthy, and Pop never saved a dime in his life.
He was W. R. Hearst's highest paid columnist. But he had seen the people of America lose their farms and homes to the banks during the Depression. He knew it could happen again. So he never even bought a home. Instead, he rented big houses, always had new cars, picked up the check wherever he went, and he sent me to some fine schools.
And as much as Pop wanted to give me the opportunity to be an Ivy League attorney, I was already becoming disillusioned by what I saw happening to Michael and James Cantillon. They were good men, but a string of Civil Law decisions in which judges ruled against Michael's clients, and according to him against the law and the Constitution as well, had Michael on the verge of giving up. For James, on the other hand, who could be an eloquent crusader for the sanctity of the letter of the law no matter how guilty his Criminal Law clients appeared to be, the experiences were even less rewarding.
People began to call him a mob attorney behind his back, and the strain of association with criminal clients, took its toll. I did not begin to see how much of a toll, until I sought some advice regarding my own situation in the aftermath of what happened to me in Rome, and I dropped by his house on the southeast corner of Sunset and Roxbury one Sunday, unannounced. He was in his living room, in the midst of patiently getting his young daughters ready to leave for church, when the phone rang. Mrs. Cantillon came in and told him a certain person, whose name I shall not mention was on the line, and he lost his temper, unleashing a stream of invectives for which I know he must have been later ashamed.
I didn't fully understand what kind of pressure he was under, until I saw him at a private club called Les Caves du Roi with one of his clients, John Roselli. I knew the Eisenhower era CIA had used Roselli, under threat of prosecution by the justice department, as their liaison with the so-called Mafia. It was said that he was a key figure in CIA plans to assassinate Fidel Castro. But I never had occasion to realize he was just one of many such CIA liaisons throughout many similarly structured organizations. Contrary to self serving misinformation between various bureaucracies, he had been green lighted by a CIA leader, William Harvey, to assist teams orchestrating the murder of President Kennedy. Throughout his life he had apparently managed to avoid prosecution because of his government connections. And his involvement with government and organized crime went further than that. After poisoning of the first owner of the Stardust Casino, Tony Cornero, he walked out of the Casino and drove back to Los Angeles, and nobody said a word. He manipulated the Teamsters into shaking down the movie studios. He allegedly orchestrated pay outs to federal judges and politicians in Los Angeles and Las Vegas. And he attended the meetings between William Harvey, other agents, and associates of underboss Sam Giancana, at the new airport Ray Ryan allegedly built for the CIA.
Roselli had been drinking that evening. Pressure from people concerned about his upcoming testimony at the House Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations, a forerunner of the Select Committee on Assassinations, must have been mounting upon him, and hence his attorney, Jim Cantillon. Jim had a few drinks too, but he was no match for the surly, belligerent and arrogant Johnny Roselli whose manners that night matched his reputation.
He was bitter about self serving politicians holding open hearings about things powerful people were determined to keep off the record, and he rhetorically and derisively questioned Jim whether anyone could expect satisfactory results from a person who was being forced to do something. He did not outright say he was talking about the government, the CIA, or the FBI. But now I am sure he was. He had cut an impossible deal to testify a certain way and stay out of prison on federal charges for interstate transportation of illegal gambling money in a fiasco called the Friars Club case. Perhaps, he was subsequently found in a fifty gallon drum of cement, with his legs cut off, as kind of a symbolic message, to indicate the so-called Mafia was concerned about the arrangement he had made to receive liberty in return for his testimony. But I just don't think so. From the way he was talking, it wasn't the underworld he was worried about.
Johnny Roselli with Jim Cantillon
At any rate, in the wake of the superficiality of the Warren Report, and the Nixon administration's destruction of the public trust by the failed cover-up of the CIA Watergate burglary, the American people had acquired a thirst for information. And despite any altruistic motives they had, a few senators and congressmen were determined to exploit that thirst for their own political aspirations. In the time honored tradition of making themselves appear more relevant by ordering government officials and members of organized crime to testify before them at open hearings, their short sighted tactics ended up creating more turmoil within the factions of the CIA, undermined the public interest, and caused more damage to ever unearthing the truth, because they got a lot of people killed.
I could see that night at Les Caves du Roi, that Roselli's problems were out of control, and those problems were starting to ensnare Jim Cantillon. And no matter how much money was at stake, I could not see how getting involved with people with potential problems like that could be worth it. I could not see any usefulness for a background in law as the foundation for a political career either. My family wasn't filthy rich, and it appeared that being self-financed was about the only way to avoid becoming swallowed up by the system. Besides, I just wasn't sure what I wanted to do. But I did know that I wasn't much interested in becoming an attorney anymore, like Pop wanted.
I couldn't see myself in the position of being a paid advocate for a ruthless client, or throwing the case of an honest client to stay within the good graces of a prejudiced judge. I couldn't imagine getting up in the morning, looking at myself in the mirror while I shaved, putting on a suit and tie that looked just like the suits and ties of all the other attorneys, and then going off every day to participate in a mockery of so-called inalienable rights, and the same old game of sophisticated lies every day.
Looking back, I was a little naive to be so high-minded, and to think I could get away with avoiding the legal system altogether, because even though I have tried my best to mind my own business in life, fate, with an assist from the banking cartel and their boot licking politicians, has ended up bringing a multifaceted assortment of evils to my doorstep. I am concerned for the future of my family and my friends, and for the future of my children's children, and so now I am forced to fight after all, and hit the law books once again. And there is nothing else I would rather do right now.
In this photo: Beverly Hills Friars Club money clip
Pop used to take me with him to a lot of cool places. We went to championship fights and sat ringside. We went on a movie junket with John Wayne to Texas, and we went to the White House when he visited President Kennedy. But I remember someone gave him a membership at the fancy Friars Club in Beverly Hills and he never took me there. So I asked him why not, and he told me there was gambling going on, which was illegal.
Sure enough, one day I read in the paper that the FBI busted John Roselli for interstate transportation of illicit winnings from peeped Friars Club card games. He and his accomplices were using peep holes, scopes and transmitters and receivers to communicate the suits and numbers of the cards to certain players at the table. That was just about the time that Ray Ryan testified against two of Roselli's Chicago Outfit pals and got them locked up for extortion, and they were accusing Ryan of the same thing they were actually doing. Their improbable defense was that he cheated with the same scheme, and they were just stand up guys looking to collect for a friend. But it didn't work. All of them went to the can, with the exception of Allen Smiley who had become involved as sort of a mediator, and had a habit of being in places where bad things happened such as the murder of Ben Siegel.
Not even criminal attorney James P. Cantillon could get Roselli off, but he did get him off from what I heard, easy. Which is too bad, because maybe if he was locked up, there would have been one more person left alive who could have talked about his pals such as CIA/KGB agent William K. Harvey, who was key in the murder of JFK. And maybe then, when leaders of the House Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities decided to create the House Select Committee on Assassinations with the purpose of subpoenaing William King Harvey, William Pawley, Sam Giancana, Charles Nicoletti, George De Mohrenschildt, F.B.I. Intellgence Division Chief William C. Sullivan, and key F.B.I. agents Louis B. Nichols, James Cadigan, J. M. English, Donald Kaylor and Alan H. Belmont, as well as John Roselli, his attorney James P. Cantillon, all dozen of them, and others, would not have died.
At the end of this clip, James Cantillon, an eloquent attorney, suddenly older and heavier, follows his client John Roselli down the steps from the Capitol hearings for the last time.
Disillusioned with politicians
Meanwhile, back in prep school, I had seen what was happening to a fine family, the Cantillons, and I wanted nothing to do with being a lawyer. I was also fast becoming disillusioned with politicians. It appeared that the political parties were nothing more than different sides of the same machine, a living, breathing, machine whose masters most often place corporate, government and individual greed ahead of the good of the people. I was not up for playing along with the charade in order to get something done, because I just did not want to be responsible for the misinformation and misplaced hatred brought about by partisan politics. I also realized how difficult it can be to influence the government to really serve the people, because powerful interests are always finding new ways to get around the rules, by consuming the legislators.
The more I studied the history of political science, the more I felt like I was wading through a sewer. I realized that the worst thing civilization could face would be the inevitable collapse of moral and ethical standards brought about by the example of our legislators allowing institutions like banks, and corporate, and political, and military interests, and not human beings, to make the rules, and thereby rig the game. And back when JFK was murdered I knew we were in deep shit. According to Eaton, he was hit with the approval of some of our highest leaders.
It was well known between both liberal and right wing factions of the feuding intelligence communuity and the Department of State, that the alleged shooter Lee Oswald had been under intense surveillance by several agencies ever since he was trained by the CIA to be a fake defector to the Soviet Union. He had been walking the line as a CIA/KGB asset, and an informant. The F.B.I., the C.I.A., and the armed forces intelligence agencies invested a lot of time and so-called taxpayer money tapping his phone calls and surveilling his activities, and inadvertently documenting each other while surveilling him. But after the assassination of the president, a cover-up regarding the files on Oswald appeared to have been in the interest of all concerned.
Oswald had purportedly defected to Russia, married the niece of a KGB secret police colonel, and been expedited back to the USA on the U.S. government's dime. Even though he had been identified, and documented through CIA photographs and FBI wiretaps, as visiting the Soviet and Cuban Embassies in Mexico City at the same time as the chief of the KGB assassination group, less than two months before the assassination. CIA Mexico Station employees later asserted they could have been mistaken about it, and that the photos did not exist, as far as they knew, and an FBI agent who talked with Oswald after the assassination stated that the voice on the wire tap tape did not match Oswald's, although the tape, like the photographs, somehow ceased to exist. But Eaton's Operation 40 contact confirmed that if Oswald wasn't a decoy, a double, or a "Patsy" as he claimed, and was in fact a shooter who was allowed to follow through with an assassination plan, he would have been but one of several shooters, in different cities, with different crews, including anti-Castro exiles who were motivated into believing that JFK betrayed them at the Bay of Pigs, and intelligence professionals whose motivation came simply as orders from a member of, or someone close to, the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
There were a half dozen factions interested in getting rid of the president. There was even a Mossad theory, involving David Ben-Gurion's apparent defiance of JFK's intentions to prevent production of an Israeli nuclear weapon. Although Eaton believed differently. One of his last assignments for the bureau had been keeping tabs on the CIA controlled Free Cuba activities. He had names of several individuals who spoke of killing the president after the failed Cuban invasion, and though the invasion was said to have been planned by a small unit of CIA professionals, he was aware of a parallel, invisible, chain of command that ran from the Pentagon to William Harvey. And while Director Hoover's orders to destroy all related paperwork, including the files on Oswald, made it difficult to establish Oswald's connection to military intelligence, or to substantiate the coordination of teams and intermediaries that were scheduled to ambush JFK in various cities on his itinerary, Eaton didn't necessarily perceive the destruction of files as a cover up of the assassination. It was simply routine, as the FBI since its inception had always destroyed important files to maintain its own privacy from other organizations such as the O.S.S., the CIA, Army, Marine and Naval Intelligence, and other agencies and powers.
According to Eaton's reasoning, the generals, private central bankers, international tax dodgers, oil barons and shipping magnates, agents of foreign powers, and politicians who would have gained from the president's demise, never needed to directly conspire with one another, because their interests were aligned. They pursued their ends through military personnel, government operatives, crime figures, Cuban exiles, and freelance killers. Some were conversant with members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the FBI, the CIA and the KGB. Some of the wealthiest individuals had connections to the legislature, the intelligence community and the so-called Mafia, that diffusive aggregation of inveterate criminals, going back decades. Yet Eaton didn't regard all those elements as distinct suspects. Many of the individual people involved held sway with several of the above mentioned organizations, and so he viewed all of them in array, as part of one disparate network. He said that the assassination emanated from a loosely connected collection of military, financial and political powers.
For instance, a few government and military officials perceived JFK as a danger to their job security. Private central bankers were afraid he was going to restore monetary control of the U.S. government to the Congress. Mafiosi chieftains were threatened by the Kennedy's attack upon organized crime. Honest businessmen who fled Cuba amid an onslaught of nationalization were infuriated by the mistaken belief that they had been betrayed by JFK in his failure to take back the island. While others were simply manipulated by military industrial motives, monied interests and foreign powers, in the wake of the president's unpopular decisions, after he was betrayed for real, whether intentionally or unintentionally, by the absence of CIA Director Allen Dulles, and the lack of direct communication through Deputy Director of Operations Richard Bissel to the military commanders. President Kennedy was thereafter set up for failure on the beach at the Bay of Pigs by deliberately faulty intelligence, and contrary orders and operations that were kept secret by an alleged traitor entrusted with command influence over the largest counterrevolutionary army and contingent of assassins in the world, William K. Harvey.
Many stood to lose if JFK were re-elected, whether from furtherance of legislation such as his Executive Order No.11110 that restored control of creating currency to the U.S. Treasury, and diminished the power of the Federal Reserve, or from a reformation within his own administration that would have ended political careers. The pending taxation of oil and other large corporations coalesced additional opposition, and his organizational vision for the CIA that differed from that of the Republican administration's Director of Central Intelligence, Allen Dulles, and the Deputy Director of Operations, Richard Bissell, fueled futher discontent and resentment.
One team of assassins was paid cash laundered through the Paradise Island Casino in the Bahamas, purportedly by a Genovese family member named Charles Tourine Jr. aka Charles Delmonico. A Corsican hit team in contact with CIA/Mafia liaison William Harvey lay in wait for JFK in Florida, and was paid with heroin. A squad of Cuban riflemen attempted to ambush the president on his motorcade from Chicago's O'Hare Airport to the Army/Air Force game, while crews, in contact with another double agent Frank Sturgis, set up to ambush him in Dallas. Some of those who could have stopped the assassination, like the Special Agent in Charge of the Dallas FBI, who received advance information and did not pass it on, may not have realized the importance or the scope of what was happening, or, may have simply been looking the other way.
Thanks to his initial assistance from President Roosevelt, back in the days when W.R. Hearst was alive, way before there was an internet, and before there was any kind of organized television news, Pop always had his general interest column syndicated on Page A2 of many papers across the country. He wrote about everything and anything. As you can imagine, his was an influential position.
He always attended the national political conventions. He interviewed and wrote about kings, presidents, movie stars, convicted murderers and leaders of industry among others. He also attended the Kentucky Derby, World Series, Super Bowl and Championship Boxing events for his popular sports column that had the most public appeal.
Some people tried to influence the things he wrote about. Sometimes they tried to bribe him. If that did not work some resorted to worse measures. Not long before he was syndicated by Hearst, his zeal for unearthing scoundrels got him beaten with baseball bats, and nearly killed, right on the street in his home town, the District of Columbia. They said from the swelling and the stitches that his head looked like a baseball. But he never sought vengeance against those responsible. Although when he ran into them by chance, one at a time, he lost his temper. And he had a terrible temper.
He continued with his unafraid style of journalism. Soon, bad people at the highest levels knew to stay out of the way of him and his friends. Some talked about taking care of him. To that end he was forced to carry a small 32 caliber Beretta. He had a badge in Los Angeles, in Chicago, and in the District of Columbia. He was a General on the staff of the Governor of Kentucky. But he was not an intimidating individual. He was a loveable guy, because he was a good man.
The power of the press
By 1962, the great power of the press, a power often enslaved by the higher powers, had been significantly eroded by television. W.R. Hearst Jr. was closing down papers left and right. So Pop used his friendship with JFK to get his column back on the Washington Post, where he had once contributed at the start of his career. He was overjoyed to return to his roots in Washington. But then, as I mentioned, a few things went slightly wrong.
The letter above is from JFK to the publisher of the Washington Post, Phil Graham. I've looked at the JFK/Graham letter in my files before and it never rang a bell. That is because I had amnesia, or more correctly put, I suffered a brain injury when I was a very young man on a job in Italy. It is a good thing I was young, because youth helped me to recover. The brain is a wonderful thing. There ought to be a non-profit organization for the care of TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) victims, and it should be run by people with first-hand experience of TBI.
Anyway, regarding the JFK/Graham letter, a nice gentleman recently contacted me and came to my home to see about taking Pop's files and letters away to be placed in a university archive. It took this man's comment about the Graham letter for my brain to remember that Graham, the patriotic publisher of the Washington Post, was an old aquaintance of Pop's, and that not long after this letter was written he had reportedly killed himself, after being unknowingly dosed with a powerful hallucinogenic, and taken away in a straight jacket by men in white coats, to a place deceptively called Chestnut Lodge.
The established story is that publisher Graham, a long time friend of the Kennedys, and one of the first O.S.S. and CIA operatives, and son in law of one of the nation's most influential bankers, was suffering from depression, and that while on stage during a newspaper convention he purportedly blurted out something about JFK's alleged affair with Mary Pinchot Meyer.
That odd story first, has the effect of defaming the president, and secondly it makes it look like, if there was something sinister going on, which there was, the president would have wanted to silence Graham. But it just doesn't not add up. When thinking about who might be behind things that happen sometimes, I always like to look first, at who profited.
Unwitting comrades
Eisenhower/Nixon era elements within the CIA were independently working to influence news media in favor of the political and economic agendas of those who stood to lose as a result of increasing Democratic popularity. Those elements shared objectives with, and were aided and abetted by, wealthy individuals who sought to disrupt the international trade, central banking and military industrial complex reforms that were underway. Party operatives of the win at all costs wars between the Republicans and Democrats, that politicians bombastically proclaim to be behind them each election day, became pawns fomenting indelible hatreds, capturing minds, and justifying deeds that were ultimately against the interests of Democracy. Those same kind of quiet tactics; spreading propaganda, bribing, ruining financially, or assassinating reputations, and ultimately actual people, emanated not only from the patriotic American political parties themselves, but also from organizations that were ultimately the sworn enemies of America... and as such, they all became unwitting comrades.
At any rate, Pop never got to publish much on the Post after Phil Graham was neutralized, and America never got to read much more of his kind of journalism. And when JFK was killed, Pop lost the most powerful supporter he had for his project AMERICA, a project based upon conversations he recorded with famous Americans like Conrad Hilton, and Martin Luther King Jr. Each individual was given the same 20 questions to tell, not so much How they achieved their measure of personal success in America, but Why Amercia made it possible for them. A few extra questions were targeted at each individual's own experience.
Each segment in this unprecedented series was slated to use different A list actors and directors for every episode, and deal with a major point in each famous person's life that led them to success - backed up by the never-before-heard interviews recorded, with people such as John Wayne and John Steinbeck. I mentioned Wayne and Steinbeck, two men of different political ideologies, to emphasize that this show is not necessarily about capitalism. It deals with personal success. It gives valuable insight into how America can help people succeed.
In my opinion, one of the greatest writers has been suppressed
But coincidentally, after the loss of JFK, Warner Brothers shelved the project AMERICA. They said it was too corny. So Pop turned his attention to writing his tell-all novel CYNTHIA, which, aside from being about his fiance who died on the eve of their wedding and haunted him all his life, is essentially his autobiography. The novel reveals, among other things, suppressed information from his mother's side of the family, beginning before there was a Washington D.C., and brings to light for the first time, additional names of people and motives behind the Lincoln assassination. It describes what it was like growing up as the youngest of a humble Irish family during turn of the century District of Columbia, two blocks from his friend J. Edgar Hoover; how he and his pals started pro football; his confidential service for President Roosevelt while living with each of the commanding generals in their various theaters of combat during World War II; his relationship with socialite Evalyn Walsh McLean who once gave him the Hope Diamond to hold during a dinner party (it remained in his pocket the whole evening, curse and all); his relationship with William Randolph Hearst, and Patricia Lake the hidden daughter of Hearst and Marion Davies; his secret meetings with Howard Hughes and his refusal to print several items that Hughes wanted leaked (I was still in my crib but I remember the crash of the large picture of a TWA Constelation that Hughes had sent him, when Pop threw it out the back door onto the driveway. A few days later he replaced it with a picture the same size, but of an American Airlines plane.); his close relationships with the people who made eight U.S. presidents; and, his personal insights regarding the private lives, motivations and the loose network of America's most powerful people during the turbulent years surrounding the Kennedy assassinations.
As one might imagine, there was great interest in this book, initially from major publishers and from the studios. But then the book became suppressed. Paramount Pictures passed on it with the comment that it was not cinematic because it followed the extraordinary exploits of the protagonist throughout his entire life. Later they made a picture called Forrest Gump, similar in scope, but lacking historical significance. So far it has grossed over one billion dollars.
Today, it is a little frightening, and sobering, to think that the message of my Pop, one of the greatest writers of all time, has been contained, and his writings have been forgotten... as if they never existed.
Kennedy supporters with Shirley Povich, General John O. Gottlieb and Pop, waiting for clearance to get into the luncheon with JFK at the finest seafood restuarant in the District of Columbia, and probably the country, back in the day when the Chesapeake Bay, the largest estuary in America, was a healthy place for fish.
I knew JFK, and I met the owner of the restaurant, old Tom O'Donnell, too. But that was normal. Wherever we went the owners always came to say hi. We were big shots, coincidentally, right up to about the time that JFK was killed.
It may appear presumptuous for me to say that the murder of JFK directly affected my family, and me. But it did.
It also had a negative impact upon a whole generation of people, all around the world, because JFK and the things he was trying to accomplsh had been their inspiration, and their chance, for a better future.
President Kennedy was restructuring the CIA. He intended to dismantle the Federal Reserve, take control of the currency, pull out of Viet Nam, replace his Vice President, appoint a new chairman of the Joint Chiefs, bust down organized crime, and commence executive orders upholding civil rights; an ambitious agenda from a man who did not have to be a career politician to make a living. Inasmuch as like all Joe Kennedy's children, he inherited $1,000,000.00 free and clear upon his 21st birthday, he could have easily chosen the life of a playboy, rather than one of public service.
A banking, military, and intelligence community controlled corporatocracy
When the voluminous Warren Commission report concluded the assassination was all the work of one shooter, many people accepted that. But the assassination had so many loose ends, that people knew in their hearts, even if they could not admit it to themselves, that there were powers that no individual, not even the optimistic JFK, could stand up to. And what is more, his murder was overt. It was done right in front of everyone, as if to teach them a lesson.
During those dark years, when JFK and then his brother RFK were murdered, so many people who surrounded the Kennedy administration seemed to have incredibly bad luck. Many others, in trying to cope, with the dread of what would happen next, became alcoholics or drug addicts, became lesser people for a time, than they would have been otherwise, and a whole generation of youth dropped out, took to getting high, and abandoned the hypocritical system that had let them down.
No one realized it at the time, but it was the beginning of an unsubstantiated kind of government taking control in the United States... a banking, military, and intelligence community controlled corporatocracy.
In this photo: A note from JFK's personal secretary Evelyn Lincoln, conveying thanks for a few Saint Patrick's Day gifts.
I don't watch much TV, but the other day I did catch part of the Chris Matthews Show, and he was saying that the Lincoln assassination was a conspiracy, but the assassinations of president JFK, and the soon-to-be president RFK, were not. Just the coincidence of a couple of crazy lone gunman striking twice. Matthews went on to pretty much say that JFK's disparaged, disgraced and discredited secretary Evelyn Lincoln had been nuts and he did not trust anything she said or wrote with regard to events surrounding the president's murder. These days, it says on Wikipedia that Evelyn improperly sold historically relevant items entrusted to her, and that she died of cancer. Well, I believe the cancer part. If you have faith in statistics, it appears that knowing too much about the assassinations at the time might have been a leading cause of cancer. But I remember how it was back in the day, and the way I heard it, Evelyn was just making sure that things went into the right hands. I remember that because some of those hands were ours.
When I was a schoolboy, I realized it would just be asking for trouble to buck the trend and tell the school teacher that the school book was totally wrong when it said John Booth was an eccentric who acted alone to kill President Lincoln. The Lincoln assassination was a coup d'etat. Now, nearly one hundred and fifty years later, it is finally okay for Chris Matthews to make those kinds of statements. So I suppose one day, if Matthews stays within the good graces of his corporate masters, he might be changing his tune about Evelyn Lincoln's last dying statement, and the dirty rotten lowdown people who sold our nation down the road.
November 1963
Eaton Chalkley and Susan Hayward had been together 9 years. Here they are at his spread in Sleepy Hollow, just outside of Carrollton, Georgia.
I found several pictures of them on the net at the Atlanta History Center. They graciously allowed me to use this photo provided that I mention them.
A repeat performance
This letter and photo memorialize when Pop did somewhat of a repeat performance for President Nixon during the Viet Nam War, of the service he performed for President Roosevelt during World War II. The difference in Viet Nam was that Bob Hope, a big Republican, had approached President Nixon about the benefits of Pop doing a report for the president from Viet Nam, and President Nixon went for it. Whereas in World War II, President Roosevelt and his staff conceived the plan of placing Pop, as a Times Herald war correspondent, with each of the generals in their various theaters of combat, as an additional way of keeping on top of them.
An American boy remembers the years after the Kennedy assassinations
That's me and Jeff Kaplan. He was a virtuoso, a classical pianist. He also played second guitar in Etta James' band. One night he invited me down to the California Club to hear them play. We were the only two white guys in the place. It was kind of scary, until I realized that people in that part of town were the basically the same as people everywhere else.
Jeff was not the first guy with whom I collaborated. I had been writing songs ever since I was a kid when I heard of a guy named Jan Berry who made a hit record in his garage. Even then, I could see there were other things, like becoming a senator for instance, where you could be more useful to other people. A career in public service looked like it would be a more fulfilling goal.
Harry Truman had once autographed a photo wishing me a useful life, and after experiencing the rhetoric of JFK, and his commitment to democracy, becoming a public servant seemed all the more like the most rewarding vocation of all. But you had to become obligated to unethical interests, or be extremely rich to get elected, so that was out for the time being. Nevertheless, Pop convinced me that even if I never had the financial clout to get elected, it would still be a good idea to have a background in Law. To that end, JFK's right hand man, Kenny O'Donnell picked me up from prep school in Connecticut, and we drove up to meet the people at Harvard. But my marks were not the best. In California I had spent more time studying cars, and waves, and music, and girls, than anything else.
Although Pop was pushing for me to receive a "presidential appointment", the Harvard people couldn't do that. They suggested that I go back to prep school for another year of credit, and then return on a trial basis. So the following year, Ken picked me up again and showed me around campus. But by that time, JFK had been gunned down, and things were different.
Being Irish, I've seen alcohol get people in ugly moods, and that is why it appeared to me that Ken had been drinking. He confirmed that when we stopped by a restaurant in Cambridge. He wasn't drinking just because he was Irish, or because he couldn't face an uncertain future. It appeared to me he was drinking because he was troubled. It appeared he either knew some of the people involved in the killing of the president, or he had a good idea about who was involved. Either way, it appeared that he couldn't do anything about it. He had survivor's guilt, and he was using alcohol to ground him.
But bingeing on alcohol, which will kill a man a lot faster than marijuana or hashish, was not what he needed. I felt like saying something like that to him. But he was old school, and that would have only made me look like a damned fool. I did manage to ask him a lot of questions though, and some of the things he said are still important. He was a smart man. When I have more time, and when I figure out a more intellectual way to tell you a story about what he heard JFK say on the phone to Fidel Castro, I'm going to tell you.
At any rate, I felt out of place at Harvard. It seemed most everybody came from old money established families, families who owned large corporations with household names, and my own Pop did not even own his house. He had seen what happened during the Great Depression when banks gobbled up farms and homes, before sending the world off to war, and he swore he would never take the chance of having a mortgage. Instead he rented, and he spent the rest of his salary generously picking up the check wherever he went.
I believed he was wrong to do that. Near the end of his life he thought so too. Every time we drove down a certain street in Beverly Hills he would chastise himself. "I could have bought that house there for $40,000," he would grumble. That is when I swore to myself, that I would never make the same mistake. I would one day use the mortgage system established during the booming real estate market of the Eisenhower administration to buy my own piece of the rock. The leverage provided by credit can be a rung on the ladder to success, and I figured that the laws passed to regulate banks would keep them from repeating their behavior during the 1930's.
Another reason I was out of place at Harvard, was because a year and a half of prep school was not enough to compensate for the precious time I had wasted on extracurricular activities. I didn't even know how to properly approach a test by skipping the most time consuming problems until last. I don't know how I got that far without realizing such a rudimentary concept.
I did however have a few things in common with my new friends at school. We enjoyed Political Science and History, and we knew for instance, what to do if the stock market ever crashed again like it did in 1929. My class took a good look at that. That's why I believe that any of us would have been able to do a better job than experts like Ben Bernanke, Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner, President Bush or President Obama, and the United States Congress, when it came down to allocating dollars to backstop the system. But they probably knew what to do as well... for themselves. It appears to me, that despite whatever good characteristics they brought to office, the decisions they made with regard to the biggest financial cover-up in history, were in large part self serving, influenced by their own financial and political survival.
My classmates and I saw that President Roosevelt was right to sign the Glass-Steagall Act, and the next two administrations during the ensuing time of destabilization had been correct to try and pump dollars into the economy. We recognized that the problem back then, as now, was corruption. Not enough money ever reached the people. Not enough people were able to buy necessities. The jobs workers had, if they were lucky to find them, were lower paying jobs than the ones they had before the crash. Consequently, not enough people were able to afford to buy products beyond bare necessities. And while the rich were doing just fine, the purchasing power of that powerful but tiny portion of society was not enough to increase overall demand, and so there were no jobs created to meet demand.
We saw how President's Truman and Eisenhower and their administrations, for all the pressures upon them, had managed to keep the members of America's private central bank and their military industrial and corporate interests from dislocating the backbone of the middle class. We saw that JFK had known what to do as well, in attempting to gain more control of those interests. Some thought that JFK was killed because he just tried to do too much, too fast. But it was more complex than that. His book Profiles in Courage (and I know Ted Sorenson wrote it, but he wrote it according to JFK's papers) had a recurrent point, a basic tenet of his philosophy. The courage JFK spoke about in the title of his book was the kind of courage an elected official must have to compromise on an issue close to his heart, and take the heat; in order to remain in office and one day cast his vote where it will do the most good. That is why it surprised me when JFK appeared to take on everybody at once.
Those who viewed him as reckless, or two-faced were mistaken. He may have appeared arrogant. But if he was, it was a righteous New England arrogance. Even so, it appeared that once in office, events had pushed him to take strong positions against powers he would have preferred to have confronted one at a time, or not directly at all. At any rate, he had just been murdered, much in the same way Julius Caesar had come to be murdered, and it shook my belief in the future of America.
Still, I was dutifully sitting at my desk in Franklin Hall, trying to study so I could one day become a useful member of the new establishment, whatever that was going to be. It was snowing, and a funky ancient radiator was making noises. I couldn't concentrate. I had read the same damn line in my history book about three times and then on the radio came rock and roll from my friends in California. That was it. I flew back to L.A. determined to succeed on my own terms, and make some money in the entertainment business, first.
Now one of the things Pop always told me was "If you want to be successful, pick one thing, and stick to it." Naturally I disregarded his advice and followed a plan to do everything. I would do it all. It seemed to me that putting images together with words and music had to be the most powerfully encompassing form of art. So I decided to write books and compose music and make movies. I'd produce, I'd take a shot at being a rock star, and an actor, and then a producer, and that way I might earn enough of my own dough to get myself elected one day, free of undue influence, where I could really do some good.
I recorded a few demos. I got a recording deal with Verve. I let my hair grow longer. I caught on with a radical inter-racial rock band who were a little fed up with their leader, Arthur Lee, and soon we were making records together... and anti-establishment statements. I even participated in a demonstration that took over the chancellor's office at UCLA, and I got to know several so-called revolutionaries who professed a desire to change the world.
Daryl Dragon at the keyboard
All of a sudden I was getting noticed, and I was given the chance to speak to people about my convictions at a few meetings and rallies. Through an actor friend, Richard Egan, I even landed the best theatrical agent, Goldstone-Tobias, which was no small feat because the agency only had 5 leading men and that included Steve McQueen.
My Big Break...
I worked hard at learning the crafts of acting and filmmaking, and I supported myself by taking a few supporting roles. Then one day I got a big break. I received a contract for a lot of money, along with a short 20 page script, to star in a picture starting coincidentally at the same location in Rome with another picture starring Eaton's wife Susan Hayward. I was a little apprehensive about the part of the cowboy assassin because the script had no story, other than I used a rifle with a telephoto lens and had a trick holster so I could draw quick and shoot knives thrown at me in mid air. At first I asked to see more pages before I signed the contract. But then they said some Italian film makers liked to improvise movies on the fly, so I decided to do it.
But Eaton wasn't looking forward to going to Rome. Usually a man of very few words, he mentioned that sooner or later something would have to be done about Bill Harvey, the current CIA Station Chief there. It turned out that Eaton remembered Harvey leaving the FBI for the CIA in disgrace, after having been caught sharing information. After the Bay of Pigs, Harvey had been relocated to Rome because of his apparently deliberate mismanagement and attraction of attention to the covert battalions of Cuban exiles and mercenaries in South America, and the largest contingent of CIA officers and assassins in history, whom he controlled.
But Eaton had a larger problem with Harvey. I recall him inferring that Harvey was no longer respected when it came to anything that conflicted with the interests of the KGB, who apparently had something on him. My recollection is that Eaton and his people were on to Harvey's involvement in the assassination of President Kennedy, and they were allowing things to play themselves out in order to learn more.
Consequently, Eaton was wary of going to Rome. I remember him saying that if anything went wrong on location, I should take Susan and we should leave there, without telling anyone we were quitting. But when it first became apparent that something was wrong, and I told Eaton about the man who was waiting in the lobby and following me from each shabby hotel from which I was being transferred, to the next, he said something to the effect that I shouldn't worry about it, because the producers were probably employing the man to protect me. He just hadn't learned yet who he was.
Remaining files to be available in 2063
Most of us will never see the CIA files regarding Harvey until 2063, exactly 100 years after the president's murder, if ever. Neither can we expect much light to be shed when the few remaining files from the Warren Commission are released to the public in 2017. For while the initial report was intended to preserve a peaceful status quo by obfuscating any connections to United States military, political and corporate interests, the U.S.S.R., Oswald's U.S. government money drops, and his clear trail to the Cubans, the Soviets and the CIA, many of the remaining files had been built to ameliorate any consternation about Cuba, the KGB, the so-called Mafia, the CIA, high government figures, and members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In any event, were the information about Oswald not destroyed, it would have either lead to the conclusion that he assassinated the president while acting in the capacity of a Soviet agent for Cuba, which would have provided tremendous public support for the U.S. military conquest of Cuba, or, that he was a CIA controlled asset set up to assassinate the president by the U.S. intelligence community while leaving it to appear that he was a Soviet agent working for Cuba, and thus have the same result.
According to Jim Cantillon in a conversation we had while waiting in line one night at the Bruin Theater in Westwood, the Kennedy murders were the exact same thing that happened to Julius Caesar, and more recently to President Abraham Lincoln, at the hands of the same kinds of powers, and it is too damn bad these things are covered up, because otherwise someone might use that information to avoid the mistakes of the past. Granted, the assassination of Caesar was over two thousand years ago and things have changed greatly since then. But people have not.
JFK had been in the enviable position of being a largely self-financed politician. He was not as beholden to special interests as most of them, and because of that it appeared he had a chance, to reform government and make it do what it is supposed to do... govern. He was attempting to tip the balance of power, so that government could effectively regulate corporate and military industrial complex interests, and the undue influence of the monopoly barons of oil, international shipping, and private central banking.
But at the time, no one was paying much attention to how effectively the forces, and their politicians, were able to foment hatred through prejudices, and to manipulate the public mind, and how that played such a big part in JFK's murder, preserving the status quo, and ultimately robbing all of those converging interests, and the American people, of their rightful future. No one was paying enough attention to the size and the connections of the informal network of mutual interests and members of government who stood to lose if JFK were re-elected for a second term. No one was paying much attention to how few people actually controlled the above mentioned interests through their control of the money supply, and many never knew the degree to which members of our own government had covered up his murder, and why they were compelled to do so.
"It was as if she was looking for someone she had lost..."
One night I was performing at the Lingerie Club on Sunset Boulevard. I noticed a young lady staring up at me. I was no sooner off the stage than she was in front of me, engaging me in conversation. Her name was Sharon Sheeley. I ended up dancing with her. We became oblivious to everyone around us. It was one of those magical kinds of things. I mentioned my agent had booked me to star in a movie, and I was leaving for Rome the next day, and she seemed distressed by that.
Now If my memory is correct, the band saw how we were acting and played a slower tune for us. I held her in my arms. She did not want to let go. She did not want me to leave her behind when I left the club either, and we ended up spending the night. And by that I mean spending the night. I do not remember much about it but I believe we just talked.
The only thing I remember so far about that night, is that she kept mentioning she had something very important to do the next day, something very important to her. But nevertheless, she insisted on staying with me that next day too. She said if I was leaving for Rome, she had to go with me.
A long time after that happened, after I had gone to make the movie in Italy, after I had been kidnapped and held in a medically induced coma for three months, after I had finally been rescued by Sharon and her friend Gordon Waller, and after I returned to the states, I was informed that Sharon had come to the Lingerie Club on that night with a group that included her husband Jimmy O'Neil, the host of the popular TV show Shindig. Jimmy had seen everything, including the two of us leaving together. I also found out Sharon was supposed to have been the maid of honor at her sister's wedding that next day, and she had stood her up to stay with me. But according to everyone that knew her, Sharon was a fine person, who would have never done such things. She had never acted that way before.
I got on that plane bound for Rome, without knowing who she was. She did not reveal that she was married, or that she was a successful songwriter who had written big hits for Eddie Cochran, Rick Nelson, Brenda Lee and others. And I did not realize it at the time, but she had put me ahead of everyone else in her life. In so many words, she had been showing me that she was very worried. Looking back, it was as if she was looking for something or someone she had lost. it was as if she had a premonition. She just couldn't leave me.
This is one of the pictures my agent was using before I left to star in the movie in Italy. After a few weeks in Rome, the producers began moving me from hotel to hotel. At first I thought they were just trying to save money, but then it became apparent that something was wrong. They said someone was tailing me. Soon, I was kidnapped and kept asleep for over 3 months. Meanwhile, they said the star of the movie had a "breakdown", and I was informed later that the producers collected a lot of insurance money... enough money to put the completion bond company out of business, and for Hercules Cinematografica to become a major company on the road to producing many films.
It started with a fellow from the lobby of a cheap hotel tailing me down the street and I had to ditch him, and it ended with military types throwing me in the back of a white van. There were benches on each side and one of them sat facing me. I tried to nonchalantly analyze how quickly I could pop open the door and jump out, but he knew what I was thinking and slightly shook his head.
They took me to the basement of a building where I was interrogated. The main fellow there looked very much like an older, evil, version of the actor Arte Johnson. He wore round glasses. He even held his cigarette in that stereotypical Nazi fashion. He was sarcastic and condescending in response to my explanation that I was in Rome because I was starring in a movie. When he was finished with his little chat, they strapped me to a table and injected me with something that knocked me out.
I don’t know how much time elapsed, or if I was taken anywhere else, but I started to awaken while the ambulance was in waiting for the gates to open at a wonderful little place called the Villa Belvedere Montello. Sometimes, during the three months that I was locked in a room, strapped down, kept unconscious and fed intravenously, someone was questioning me, and if I gave the wrong answer, or did not know the answer, something would make me feel horrible. I think that was done chemically. I thought it might be a behavior modification technique, but at the time, I was certain that they were asking me questions about things I did not know, and just couldn't answer.
The Villa Belvedere Montello, at the time was a twenty room facility, about two miles west of the Vatican. If you are standing in St. Peter's Square and looking toward the Basilica you are looking in the right direction. The villa is located on a short dead end street of the same name and has an eight foot perimeter wall with an electrified security wire atop. I know that because I set the thing off a long time ago.
After weeks or months of them bringing me to the brink of no return and then letting me rest, I remember blurting out to them something like "Alright. It's true! I'll say anything you want!"
I came out of it and woke up on my own at least twice. The first time I awakened, I was furious, and I sat up and pulled the tubes out. Something must have alerted them because they rushed in, held me down and fixed me up. I remember that happening.
Another time, I was a little smarter, and I managed to escape over the rear wall. But I did not get too far. I made it to a gas station where the only car was up on a jack with the rear wheel off. The key was in the ignition. I was quickly assessing my chances of getting the wheel back on when a car from the villa swung in behind me. I am still not one hundred percent sure if that happened during the escape, or if happened before I was initially kidnapped.
I am sure however that on another occasion they awakened me and prepared me for a visitor. It was Eaton's wife Susan Hayward. She sat by my bed and we talked, but she never mentioned, at that time, what had happened to him. She never said he was dead. When I asked her how he was, she said he was fine. And when I asked her to let him know where I was and have him get me out of there, she said she would. But I didn't believe her. There was a communication there, in her eyes, without saying her saying anything to me. After all, she wore a black veil, and she was head to toe dressed in black.
In this photo: Susan Hayward letter, page 1
Putting this private letter of Susan's on the internet might be regarded as poor taste. But it would be okay with her.
If you go on Wikipedia you can even read something more inappropriate; the official speculation for why she died young. The story, originally hypothesized by a newspaperman, revolves around the theory that she may have been contaminated with radioactive fallout from above-ground atomic bomb testing during the making of The Conqueror, with John Wayne, and how several of the production members, as well as Wayne himself, later succumbed to cancer and cancer-related illnesses. That explanation has a good ring to it. The mainstream media has dutifully added it to her epitaph. But they are mistaken. John Wayne got cancer from smoking. And Susan believed she was intentionally given cancer when she was involuntarily sedated during the time after Eaton's death.
I could be wrong, but what went down that winter in Italy and over the next few years appeared to be so bizarre, that the coincidences were impossible to dismiss, and in my search for answers I was initially wrong about at least one thing... When they woke me up and prepared me for a visitor, and when Susan appeared and sat at my bedside at the villa, I was more out of it than she imagined. She didn't mention that Eaton was dead, but in her black dress and veil, she left me to surmise. So I inquired about him, and asked her to tell him where I was, and that I needed to see him. But the way she was acting didn't make sense. It was as if she was trying to tell me something but had to keep her thoughts about it to herself. There was a whole conversation that was being avoided, and it crossed my mind that she may have dressed that way in order to let me know what happened to Eaton. However, I was at least partly wrong about that. It turned out she dressed that way for the rest of her life, always wearing black, except for when she had a part to play. And, for all I know, she really didn't tell anyone what had happened, with the exception of the Jesuit Tom Brew, perhaps, and the things she later said to me.
I don't remember knowing Eaton's schedule when we were in Rome. I don't remember much of the time I was there, when I was initially transferred from the Excelsior Hotel because it was too expensive for the budget. I do remember certain things like the knife throwing lessons while we were making the movie, and when the producers were trying to protect me by changing my hotel from one out of the way dive to the next. But I do not now remember, them giving me an explanation at the time, for why I was moved around to so many hotels. Even after the first clear attempt to kidnap me, when I went to the closed American Embassy for help, I did not know who was behind it. I don't remember now, and perhaps I never knew.
In this photo: Susan Hayward letter, page 2
Both Susan and Eaton died young, in their 50's; Eaton first, and then Susan, who endured nearly ten more years because of her will, and because she got away from Florida and returned to the protection of her old doctor in Beverly Hills.
What I have just mentioned here is more than just a theory. I pursued Susan. I saw her several times before l found out she was positive that Eaton had been poisoned on the day I was captured, and she only mentioned it because she assumed that I knew. She kept to herself. She didn't want to talk to me, or anyone else, about her perspective of what had happened, because people would never understand. They would believe she was losing her sanity. And after all, what good could it have done?
During all of this, she must have been frightened, but she was brave. The last time I saw her, they said she had had what they call "a breakdown". She had told several people that
"they" had killed Eaton and were trying to kill her too. She had just been released from the Department 95 psychiatric unit where she had been involuntarily committed, and she had accused the doctors there of wanting to kill her too. She had been given Lithium, Phenothiazine, and Chloral Hydrate, a drug that can glue the synapses together and make it difficult to think complex thoughts. She was in a wheelchair, and calm, naturally, considering what they had forced upon her. Still, she was independent, and she looked at me with the same eyes as she had in Rome. Notwithstanding her incomparable grace and the social skills of an extrovert, she had been a lone wolf all her life. I don't believe she ever told her own sons about the double life that she and Eaton lived. But by the time she moved from Florida back to Beverly Hills she had become inscrutable.
For obvious reasons, I would have preferred to have never mentioned any of this. Even if something good might come from the truth, which I hope it does, it can trouble the thoughts of good people, and the families of those involved. But I am not worried that it will tarnish the public mind's make believe image of the movie star, the beautiful Susan Hayward, by mentioning what a tough time the beautiful Susan Hayward that I knew had. I am not going to worry if it hurts my own credibility to talk about it, because most people would never believe it, or that it detracts from the positive message I would like to convey and the causes for which I care. I am not going to worry about those things. I just felt that saying something about it is my obligation, and I thought that someone might want to hear.
Jane Asher, Sharon Sheeley, Peter Asher, Gordon Waller
Years later, I found a letter to my Pop from LBJ's Chief of Staff stating that he was happy to have been of help in Rome. The letter was dated toward the beginning of my containment. It appears that someone connected to Mr. Hand was instrumental in moving me from the places where I was initially taken, to a place called the Villa Belvedere Montello, because it was the recommended facility for the Department of State. I was later forwarded a letter from Tony Valeri to Fernando Ghia stating that the producers wanted me to finish the movie, and that it would be a shame if I were not allowed to follow through with the opportunity. But it is odd. At the time those letters were being written, I was locked up, strapped to a hospital bed, and being kept unconscious, in that place called the Villa Belvedere Montello located at Viale Belvedere Montello, 56... and nobody, not even LBJ's right hand man, was getting me out...
In the nick of time
No one else knew what was going on, except for my amazing friend, Sharon Sheeley, who had been tracking me. Sharon was a lady who got things done. She flew to London with an entertainer named Gordon Waller and obtained appropriate papers for my release into their custody, from Gordon's father who was the assistant and protege of the physician for the British Royal Family.
According to Gordon, the whole thing had been on the spur of the moment. He had been on his way back to London from Los Angeles, and when he boarded the plane he found Sharon already waiting in the seat next to his. "What a coincidence," she said. According to Gordon, they had a lot of drinks on the flight. And then, after they arrived in London, she presented the plan to go to Italy and get me out. "Come on... It'll be fun," she had said.
Still it wasn't a clean release. The man charge of the Villa Belvedere that night was stalling. He said my belongings were locked up and we would have to wait for someone else to return in the morning. But we did not wait. We got the hell out of there in a hurry, under the noses of whoever had paid for, or given the orders to put me there, and I was forced to leave my papers and my suitcases behind. It was in the nick of time, for if I remained at Villa Belvedere Montello any longer, I'm sure I would have never, ever, recovered from what they were doing.
Sounds farfetched doesn't it? Sounds like I'm trying to make my life into a sinister movie. But the incident I am describing took place within only three months of my life, a long time ago. If anything it has made me more careful. But I would like to mention the obvious; that powerful people, or organizations, and other powerful entities and agencies, in conjunction with some of the most preeminent experts on pharmacological and electronic behavior modification techniques, do all kinds of things to people behind the peaceful facades of private and public facilities. There is more of it going on today than ever, and less of it being reported.
And although these kinds of things are not unusual, we do not hear about them too often. When something like what happened to me, happens to a person, they are usually not going to tell anyone about it, because the first thing someone else will think is that the person telling the story is crazy. Gordon Waller's wife even asked me "What did you do to have them put you in that place?" But it was not what I did, it is what they lied that I did, that purported to justify their actions. That's how it works.
Sometimes, due to the very weight of the authority that was stacked against me, and the way the thing unfolded, I have even questioned myself, whether I might just be in denial of what really happened, and that maybe I did actually do the thing they said in the report after all. But the problem with that, is that I never let go of what happened. I remember what happened. They couldn't take that away from me. I remember they were lying then, and I remember afterwards they were lying and covering it up. I remember they were trying to shut me up.
Kind of like today
It is kind of like today, when you have someone who lost their pension, or investment money, or equity in their home, or their job, or their home, and they are angry as hell, but do not quite know what to do about it, and end up somehow blaming themselves for not being "responsible". They don't see how they were victimized by the largest international securities swindle in history.
It is like today, where you have a large international bank, for instance, that has acquired many smaller banks and then decided to change its name to the best of the names it owns, a name even better than the Federal Reserve, the Bank of America. And then that international bank created a logo that looks like the American flag and they changed their colors to the red, white and blue. Let us just say this large international bank like the one that is now calling itself the Bank of America decided it could make an obscene amount of capital if it purchased insurance called credit default swaps that would pay off many times the value of the mortgages they were insuring if the mortgages failed, and so they aided and abetted their representatives to steer people into predatory high yielding loan terms they knew would fail, but at the same time securitized those mortgages and sold them off to unsuspecting pension funds and banks around the world, because the rules even allowed them to purchase credit default swaps on the mortgage backed securities they had already sold, and did not even own.
Let us just say this large international bank, the Bank of America, was also the main international bank in control of the Federal Reserve, and that it and its Federal Reserve member partners deliberately declined to refinance all the designed to fail mortgages they had originated, while at the same time raising interest rates twelve times during 2006 and 2007, under the false flag of fighting inflation, to make sure those adjustable rate mortgages went into default.
Let us just say the large international bank or an alleged representative of an investor pension fund or foreign bank to whom the international bank allegedly sold the mortgage securitization, eventually decided to foreclose on the underlying home that a trusting American homeowner had put up as collateral for a mortgage that was believed to have been a rung on the ladder of the American dream. And let us say the homeowner seeks protection from the Court.
But let us just say that the whole damn scheme is just too compound of a problem for the average homeowner, member of congress, or even a judge to cognicize, and the Court sides with the large international bank, the so-called Bank of America, because it is shrouded in the red, white and blue colors of America, and its lobbyists have written the laws of the land. And so then the homeowner, the actual victim of the scheme, faced with such insurmountable authority, ends up conceding that the large international so-called Bank of America must have been right after all, and that he or she was irresponsible, and wrong. That's just what happens to peoples thinking when they come up against an organization that has control over governments and the dialogue about what is supposed to be right or wrong.
It is just like that, when due to the weight of authority stacked against anyone, they cannot help but have a tendency to question themselves, as to whether they just might be in denial of what really happened, and that maybe they were actually wrong and irresponsible after all. For maybe they did do all the things that the international bank controlled narrative said they did.
But the problem with that, is that some of us will never let go of what happened. We will remember what happened. They cannot take that away from us. We will remember they were lying before the financial crash, and we will remember they have been lying ever since and trying to cover it up. And we will not let them shut us up. We will not let them get away with it.
So what else is new?
Well, taking control of people is as old as the hills, from an ordinary husband or wife, or family member, who knows how to write up a phony complaint and get someone in their family locked up, like the way J. Edgar Hoover's mother institutionalized his father, all the way up to the most powerful, monied individuals in the world who control society through political parties and other centers of power, by buying, intimidating, subverting and assassinating the leaders, and dumbing the rest down, erasing their memories, addicting them to alcohol, plying them with drugs, or inventing stories to frame them or have them taken off. It is a huge control business, bigger than the advertising business and its agencies that train people to mindlessly purchase corporate products designed to become obsolete.
The stresses created by the largest economic collapse in world history, amid the outrage toward the powers that bought it about, resulted an increase in risky and dangerous behavior, and consequently, a revisionism of formerly unconscionable practices forbidden in the past. Within the psychopharmacology and neuropsychiatric industries for instance, there has appeared a resurgence and a justification for many of the neuron destroying medications and practices that were some years ago abandoned. For like their Big Brother cousins in the political and media organizations, their practices are regulated only by themselves and their masters in the pharmaceutical industry and financial establishment, and the laws that would govern them are written almost entirely by their lobbyists.
Obviously, there are positive outcomes that are totally different from the negative pictures I just painted, and there are many doctors of psychiatry who do good, and who do not see pharmaceuticals as the cure for every individual that has had a label put upon them. After all, the people in the white coats are supposed to be the ones who are taking care of us all. It is just a question as to whether they can have us all taken care of or not, and that by virtue of their lack of external oversight, and the undue influence of Big Brother and its money, our most respected and trusted institutions can become perverted, and sometimes fail to do anything other than great harm. Pier Angeli for instance, was an alumna of the terrifying regimen at the Villa Belvedere Montello in 1970 when she was 38 years old. She died at the age of 39, one of 256 patients known to have killed themselves after being "cured" there.
A paranoid narcissist crackpot
"You are a paranoid narcissist crackpot who thinks he is the only one who knows how to fix everything." That is what somebody wrote on the contact Vince form. Another person wrote, "Look in the mirror and you will see a first class swine." Another guy called me up and asked, "So you think you are in the Mafia do you?" Another person left death threats, and another warned me not to publish my article on the Lincoln conspiracy again. The Lincoln Conspiracy? Are you kidding me???
But the point most all these people, if they are more than one person, have missed here, is what I am actually writing about. They cannot see how government bureaucracies, corporate powers, organized crime, the psychopharmacological and neuropsychiatric industries, the oil and nuclear energy industries, the media and communications industries, or the military industrial congressional complex and its policy making arm the CIA, are connected with one another and controlled by the movement of money. They cannot see what all of these powers have in common. They do not realize that it is not only the United States of America that is operating in this fashion but the whole world. To them they all appear to be separate and distinct like oil and water. They do not understand that this whole blog is primarily about just one thing.
Let's face it. We have been talking about Big Brother, and how each and every one of us is controlled. It is not the outdated Big Brother of the George Orwell novel, or someone like the Pope who may or may not believe he is drinking the blood of Christ during the Consecration, because after all Big Brother today is not simply an individual or even an easily defined group of individuals. Nor is Big Brother a hereditary line of puppet masters alleged to be calling themselves the Illuminati. For while that is the general idea, it appears that such particularly narrow lines of thinking got onto the wrong track somewhere close to leaving the station. Big Brother is simply just one living, breathing, unthinking, often invisible, collective being of gargantuan proportions that hides beneath the trust of the whole of human consciousness. No really. And those are the kinds of sentences and explanations you get when I'm being distracted.
When the film eventually came out, most all of my scenes had been reshot with another actor.
From the Villa Bevedere, Sharon and Gordon and I drove straight to sound check at the Piper Club in Rome where Sharon had arranged for me to perform with Dennis Dell's band. I was messed up but I remembered my act, and the words to the tunes. It's funny how the brain works like that. Later that evening, my Italian agent, Fernando Ghia, showed up at the club and warned us that someone connected to both sides was looking for us. So we got out of town right after the show. Gordon went back to London, and Sharon and I went on to Paris where we kept a low profile, and I tried to assess the situation.
One night..., and I remember it vividly, exactly where we were and how she looked at me. I had just hung up the phone after an aggravating conversation with someone in the states. She mentioned that from where she was standing, with the light the way it was, I looked just like Eddie Cochran. She said that she had been his fiancee, and she followed that up by telling me that on the night when we met I was exactly the same age, to the day, as he was when he was killed. That really floored me. It gave me some insight as to how she may have been thinking on the night when we met.
Before the brain injury I had just suffered in Italy I would have probably remembered more about who Cochran was, but I found myself searching my mind for an image of him. When she said Eddie was moody, a rebel like me, I thought I recalled a mental picture of someone wearing a black leather motorcycle jacket, so I imagined him as being involved with motorcycles. I asked her, "How did he die? Wasn't it a motorcycle wreck or something like that?" She simply said, "Yeah, something like that." Verbatim.
Sharon never did tell me what had really happened. Years later I learned about the car accident they were in together, and how Sharon had lain hospitalized for weeks with a broken back and pelvis, while the London tabloids had a field day about her loss. At the time, I did not know how much Eddie's death memorialized her in the minds of the Brit music sector, how they perpetuated it all her life, and how she would never be free.
Eaton was exactly the kind of man the FBI liked
He had been one of the very first special agents. He grew up within blocks of Pop and J. Edgar Hoover, and he had helped establish the FBI, and then their presence in Dallas, Los Angeles, and San Diego. He also had a lot of knowledge about what was going on with the Syndicate, the intelligence community, and that fabled city on the banks of the Potomac, his home town, Washington D.C.
Back in the day when the F.B.I. had only about 1,000 special agents and was struggling to survive, he helped track down John Dillinger, which was the single most important event in getting Congress to appropriate funds the bureau needed to obtain guns and badges and go on to become the finest secret police force in world history. Eaton wasn't part of the squad that ambushed Dillinger when he walked out of the movie theater, but I have personal knowledge that he drove as far as Washington state to interview Dillinger's ex-wife when they were looking for him. My friends Dr. Lee Siegel and his beautiful bride Noreen Nash double dated with Eaton and Susan on their first date. Eaton asked Noreen where she hailed from and she responded "...somewhere you've probably never heard about, a little town called Wenatchee, Washington." But Eaton said he did know Wenatchee, because he had driven up there to talk with Dillinger's ex-wife as they were hunting him down.
Right out of the movies
Eaton was right out of the movies. He was exactly the kind of man the FBI liked to have. He had a keen but undogmatic mind, and a sophisticated understanding of human relations. The bureau was fortunate to have him, and an intelligence agency that had people of his caliber was in turn well worth trusting.
He was clean cut. He looked in a way like every man, and did not arouse suspicion. But then, when he married Susan, he became a little too good looking. He always had a tan. He capped his teeth. He owned the Cadillac dealership in Carrolton. He knew a Georgia peach when he saw one. He called the ladies "Honey". He had a long wide furrow from a Confederate trench running across the verdant meadow of his ranch in Sleepy Hollow Georgia. Every couple of years he would drive out to California in a new Cadillac, doing FBI undercover work along the way, and then give the car to my Pop, and fly back east. He was something else. Nobody knew who he really was, and he got away with that for a long time.
When I was young he took me with him to a few places because it improved his cover. No one suspected a man with a young boy. When the mob and others got onto him, the bureau made it appear like he had been let go, although he still continued to work for them. After he married Susan Hayward, a lot of people attempted to learn more about him. They found out about the FBI, but were told he had been a clerk, and they came away with the perception that Eaton was just a kept man.
But Eaton was a high level asset right up until the time he was killed. Among other things, one of his jobs for the director, on President Kennedy's orders, had entailed following up with agents in Florida ordered to shut down deliberately mishandled Cuban exile forces. There were people within the military intelligence community against that. There were different powers at play. Even the FBI itself had changed greatly from the days when it was just a federal agency, and he knew every person by name. The bureau had been compromised, slowly infiltrated by various interests, one agent at a time, just like former FBI agent turned CIA asset William K. Harvey who had been blackmailed and turned by the Soviets in the late forties.
At any rate, after the JFK assassination, Eaton was frustrated by the bureau's about face on any further follow up to the considerable amount of information they already had on Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby. He knew Ruby through his work for the bureau in Cuba and Dallas, and when Ruby shot Oswald, and he saw who Oswald was, it took him no time to confirm that the president had been murdered with the complicity of some of our highest officials, and that the CIA, and then the FBI, were in the process of covering it up.
While we were killing time on the set, Eaton did mention he had examined the bureau's information associated with the Bay of Pigs failure, and he knew that Bill Harvey originated much of the misinformation and attention that had undermined JFK's orders that the U.S. military remain disconnected from the Cuban operation.
He told me in particular, on those last days in Rome, that Harvey was a double agent (CIA/KGB) who knew people with ties to political machines, the mob, and international contract killers, and that Harvey was instrumental in the president's assassination. He said there was a chain of command in the operation to overthrow Castro under President Eisenhower that later turned into a chain of deception for President Kennedy.
That chain would have run up from Harvey through the Assistant Deputy Director of Operations, Tracy Barnes, to the Director of Operations, Richard Bissell. Eaton said an unofficial chain of command governing the Cuban operation circumvented the planning unit between the White House and the CIA, and ran from the Joint Chiefs back the same way. He said the CIA had not been working for the president and his staff the way it was intended, and had begun to operate instead as a foreign policy making machine of the military. Then, there was also the predominately Eisenhower/Nixon regime Secret Service, all of them apparently good men, but with different political perspectives than the president, who were handpicked by a Republican Secretary of the Treasury, a central banker who did not agree with the precedent the president had established by the creation of six billion dollars in silver certificates, in circumvention of the power of the Federal Reserve.
Eaton never actually told me the names of everyone I mention. But he would have had to have known that after the Bay of Pigs, JFK removed CIA Director Allen Dulles, and transferred William Harvey to Rome in an effort to isolate and contain him. In those days, before cell phones, when there were only two telephone cables running each way beneath the Atlantic, even the US Embassy in Rome could have trouble getting a phone connection to the United States. But just the fact that Harvey was relocated and not terminated, had made Eaton realize that the president's people did not understand how dangerous Harvey really was.
At the time, during those last few days in Italy, Eaton appeared lonely as if he were out of favor with people around him. I know he and Pop appeared to have had some kind of disagreement and were no longer as close, and that Eaton's only son had been killed just months before in a single engine plane crash. In retrospect, Eaton was surrounded by adverse circumstances. He wasn't the same easy going guy that once advocated I should get to keep the Flamingo cufflinks. And if I had to pick a milestone turning point, I would have to say it was President Kennedy's murder. So maybe those things, and the circumstances he found himself in, had something to do with why he had shared more information with me than expected.
Before we left Los Angeles for Italy, I told him I doubted he was still with the FBI. He smiled and flipped out his badge and ID. Later, it turned out he had been right. It turned out that the two crew cut men who caught me, and I mean caught me, because I eluded them for a bit, took their orders from CIA Roma Station Chief, William Harvey. It turned out that Harvey was the most well known CIA connection to the underworld's Sam Giancana, John Roselli, Jack Ruby, and hundreds of other killers none of us will ever hear about. He had been effectively placed in charge of a large contingent of assassins, and regiments of counterrevolutionary commandos that he had managed, with full deniability, for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And as for Eaton, he was poisoned the day I was kidnapped. He barely made it to the airport and onto a plane back to the states where he died while I was being kept in a medically induced coma. It appears I may be the only person alive today who knows that he still worked for the FBI. But I don't think so.
Still, it appears farfetched that what happened to Eaton had anything to do with what happened to me doesn't it, even though it was a coincidence. It happened on the same day, when we were both in Rome, and William Harvey, Eaton's former fellow agent and nemesis, who did not care for pro-Kennedy senior FBI agents, just happened to be the CIA station chief in Rome at the time. Come to think of it, any pro-Kennedy FBI agent would have been contained by their own bureau at the time.
Started to investigate
Meanwhile, I didn't have trouble finding work in Europe to support myself, and I started to investigate the people who I was told were involved with what happened to me. But it was not as easy as finding a mad Doctor Frankenstein working in the tower of a foreboding castle. And the obvious people I first singled out were hardly the ones to blame.
For instance, a few years afterward I took a flight into Rome just to get introduced to Count Andrea Paolo Dotti, the owner of the Villa Belvedere Montello. I confronted him. But he turned out to be a courteous, well educated doctor, honored for his papers on the neurological and pharmacological trials of Lithium, a light metal based drug that appears to narrow the difference between the highs and lows of high strung people. Kind of dims the lights so to speak.
He wasn't the twisted MK Ultra madman upon whom I had imagined seeking vengeance either. He was just a big friendly fellow, reportedly a descendant of a saint by the same name who was canonized by Pope Pius VII, and his wife, Audrey Hepburn, with regard to her work around the world for the United Nations Children's Fund, had to have been an utter saint herself.
Count Dotti said he wasn't present during my stay. He apologized for not knowing who I was. Even the director of the place, the kindly doctor who later told me that it could take me twenty years to recover completely from what had been done, and that some people never do recover, appeared to have had the best intentions, because he had no reason to doubt the file that had been sent to him when I arrived in the ambulance unconscious. He had no reason to doubt the colleagues who arrived to "treat me" with the "sleeping cure" during the three months before I was rescued by Sharon and Gordon.
At any rate, when I finally returned to America, I was hoping my problem with Big Brother was over. But when I got off the plane, four officers in plain clothes escorted me to their car. No warrant. No nothing. Just put me in a car and then got on the radio and said. "This is Zebra squad. We got him. We are in route." Scary stuff. Especially because they took me to the same place where they had Susan.
After they moved me around for a couple of days with no sleep, a doctor (whose last name starts with a T) brought me up to a room where there was nothing but a table and two chairs against the wall where we had to sit. But I didn't like the way it was going. I became suspicious because the questions he was asking were not appropriate. I figured he must have had a file on me that had been created in Italy.
I noticed on the opposite wall there was a large mirror, and next to it a door. So I got up from my chair and flung the door open to find a video camera running and a group of people sitting in school desks, taking notes. They were more shocked than I was, as I stood there and stared at them with a certain amount of anger, disgust and disappointment. With that, the doctor in charge said something like "Okay, you win," and ushered me out. And that was the end of my interview. But I knew I was in a lot of trouble, and that he was not going to be writing a report in my favor.
During the next few days my education increased. I saw them overdose a healthy looking young man who didn't appear crazy to me, but he was not very smart either, because he had an annoying habit of attracting attention to himself by talking back, being generally uncooperative, protesting the unfairness of his situation, and demanding that he be set free. So they held him down on the floor and injected him with a drug called Prolixin, to which he had an allergic reaction. He went into convulsions. Before anyone could do anything about it he extended his lower teeth in front of his upper teeth, and then pulled back his jaw back breaking out all of his upper teeth. I was surprised at how otherwise well meaning people could negligently facilitate such an evil thing.
One sure fire way to avoid the above mentioned kinds of problems
Finally, I was able to get to a phone, and I called a friend of mine who was, and still is, an attorney. I explained what was going on and he said not to worry. He casually asked if I could I come up with two thousand dollars, and I said yes. I asked him what the two thousand was for, and he said half was for him, and the other half was for Doctor T. In about a day, Doctor T finished his report, a good one, and before I was released he had me into his office to give some advice. He ended up saying, "As long as you've got a grand in your pocket, you've got nothing to worry about," which gave me additional incentive to start making more money, and for some reason I have never had any problems like the ones I just mentioned ever since.
I should also probably mention, with regard to the well meaning noodle doctors out there, which there are, and/or pharmaceutical salespeople who honestly believe Eli Lilly Corporation did a benevolent thing to sell the rest of their Mercury laden Thiomersal to South America after it had been banned in America and Europe, that the vast majority of doctors involved in the mental health and pharmaceutical industries are by no means beady eyed little devils consumed with depopulation, MK Ultra type experiments, and greed. Many of the people in the industry are admirable folks, who are working toward important goals. It is just that the evil ones are so insidiously woven into the fabric of society. It's too bad there are still people like that in the world.
And just in case somebody reading this is starting to think that I may not be electable because of what I just told you, I want you to know that I'm going to delete this whole schtick as soon as my campaign catches fire. It happened a really long time ago. I have a completely clean background. The worst thing on my record is a traffic ticket. And if anyone ever brings up some of the things I've been talking about here, I will have two choices. First, I could just deny it, or secondly, I could just imitate one of my friends from the UCLA football team who used to work for me. One dawn while we were loading up my truck after working all night inside a restaurant named Matteo's, I was kidding him about his defensive position on the kickoff team. I inferred that the coach used him in that capacity because he was a little crazy. To my surprise he said with a slow smile, "I am. I'm psycho."
This is a letter from Pop's friend Lloyd Hand. Lloyd was LBJ's right hand man from the early days in Texas, right up into the White House where he was effectively Chief of Staff. I am relating this from memory so I could be a little off... I remember when I was a little kid, what a good impression Lloyd made upon me. My father mentioned that when I grew up it would make him proud if I turned out to be an Ivy League guy like Lloyd. Years later, I learned who Lloyd was. He was from Texas, and he wasn't an Ivy League guy at all. He came to Washington with LBJ. But I suppose calling him an Ivy League guy was just the best way for Pop to describe him, because he fit the part.
My youthful impression of Lloyd Hand was that he was good looking and clean cut. He wore khaki slacks with a dark blue blazer, a blue button down shirt, a blue and red regimental tie, and he had a great smile, to go with his upbeat personality. He struck me then as a great guy, and I believe that to this day. To me, he came to personify the positive outlook of a real American, an American with humility and poise, in contrast to the so-called ugly American tourists who visited Europe after World War Two with their pot bellies, Hawaiian shirts, Kodak Cameras, and an attitude of superiority for winning the war, when in fact the nations of Europe had been fighting that same war for over 2,000 years. Since I was just a small kid when I first met the future Ambassador Hand, I can only conclude that I have remembered all of these details because I have repeatedly thought about his involvement in what happened to me in Rome.
I had met Lloyd when I was a child, and I had liked him. He had my approval. But on up through my twenties I had not the slightest idea he worked for LBJ, who had a reputation for being crude and ruthless. Once I found out that Lloyd was LBJ's right hand man, I began to see President Johnson in whole a new light, for if he was best friends with Lloyd, then President Johnson had a lot of good in him, a good that was manifested when his ruthlessness came together with his desire to achieve legislation in the public interest.
Children have their own way of knowing sometimes when someone is insincere. For instance, my recollection fails me when it comes to memories of my early childhood. Only a few things stand out. But when I was about five or six years old, I met a creep named Frankie Carbo who appeared at the house unannounced. I was standing near the front door when the bell rang, and I just opened it. He walked into the entry and stood there chatting me up in a soft menacing voice with all the usual questions for kids. But in his cold eyes I could see he would have just as soon eaten me.
Within a minute Pop came in and ushered the man aside to the hallway. They spoke briefly, in low ominous tones, and I recall Pop pretty much kicked him out. Some years later, when I was about eight years old, I saw the same man's picture attached to a rap sheet on Pop's desk. That is when I realized that Carbo was the man I had met. The rap sheet was printed by an electric typewriter in dark blue ink on a heavy bond paper. I'm sure it came from the director, Mr. Hoover. Under Carbo's name it said "member of Murder Incorporated" so I asked Pop who he was. Pop brushed off my question by saying that Carbo was just a guy that wanted to get involved in something he was doing, and so he had checked him out, and as a result wouldn't have anything to do with him. I remember thinking how stupid mobsters were, to operate a murder for hire organization and call it "Murder Incorporated". As if they they had a big sign out front on their building and everything. What idiots. They should have embroidered the name on the backs of their jackets too, I mused to myself.
This rap sheet here is not the one I remember seeing with "member of Murder Incorporated" on it. So it has to be an earlier sheet, and that means Pop received an FBI sheet on Carbo on at least two occasions. It appears he was keeping tabs on him. It wasn't unusual for Pop to get people's records from the F.B.I., because he often checked people when he was dealing with businessmen for projects he deemed worthwhile. But he always threw the reports away after he looked at them. In this case, he has written,' "Frankie" Carbo's arrest record from the F.B.I.' in his distinguishable penmanship, at the top of the page. Many of the things he left behind have notes written on them. But he only did that when it was something important to him.
Let me put this in perspective. The subject of Frankie Carbo is a bit off topic from the injury I sustained in Rome. I just posted it here in the context that little children can often see into people's hearts. They can often tell when a person is good or bad, such as when I met Lloyd Hand and I could tell he was a good man.
Further, the fact that Carbo was a member of Murder Incorporated, shouldn't provoke consternation about the implications of his unnanounced visit. Carbo was involved with La Cosa Nostra out of New York, and with fixing big fights. Some have even speculated he was involved in orchestrating the hit on Ben Siegel. But in this case, his attempt to intimidate Pop had more to do with his efforts to muscle in on the fight game on the west coast, and in response, it appears Pop and his friends made sure Carbo stayed locked up.
There were other people involved in boxing that stopped by the house. But they were good guys. Rocco Francis Marchegiano, aka Rocky Marciano, was the only undefeated Heavyweight Champion of the World, and he was an admirer of Pop. He was a nice guy with a lot of guts. He and his manager Al Weil had picked Pop to write his autobiography as well as the screenplay for The Rocky Marciano Story. Both of those works have never been published or produced because of Rocky and his manager Al's untimely deaths in August and October 1969, and the subsequent desire of Rocky's widow to remain out of the limelight.
Still visualizing the different kinds of people who influence the loosely knit invisible powers that control the governments of the world
I do have however other seemingly less interesting files that are relevant to the subject I was talking about before Carbo, Weil and Marciano..., regarding the long aftermath and my struggle to make something out of myself after what happened to me in Italy. I was trying to get a handle on exactly who in the hell was ultimately responsible, and recently, I was looking at something I had overlooked, that for me, has raised unanswered questions.
There is this cover page from a book that was anonymously sent to me when I was being held at the Villa Belvedere. It has a sticker indicating it was purchased in Washington D.C. In my own hand on the page it says "page of book sent from U.S.". There is another note in another file cabinet that says the book was "Seven Days in May", a book about how a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff plotted to assassinate the president.
Back in 1963, the book was being made into a movie by JFK's friends at Warner Brothers, the same studio where JFK had insisted Pop write the screenplay for PT 109. I understand that JFK was very much interested in that whole military coup d'etat scenario, and looking forward to seeing the film's completion and release. What haunts me, is the vivid recollection that there was no information as to the sender. I asked the people at Villa Belvedere who sent it, and they said it came with no return address. I remembered that, because it was odd.
Although I don't remember the actual book. I don't remember reading it. I might not even recall the front cover if I saw it. But I do remember I left it behind because I had to get out of the villa in a hurry without my things, and since I wondered who sent it, I ripped off the page with the sticker of the shop in Washington D.C. where it was purchased, and took that with me. I vaguely remember looking through all the pages to see if there was a message or something. But there was nothing. I though that maybe someday I would learn who sent it, and why.
But why in the hell would someone anonymously send me that particular book, and who was the person who sent it??
It may be nothing more than someone wanted to give me some reading material while I was laid up. But I was hardly in a position to read while I was there. Further, nobody in the States knew where I was, that I knew, except for my folks, my agent, and my friend Sharon Sheeley in Los Angeles, and Lloyd Hand in Washington D.C., and they all said they did not send it. Also, my past experience has been that when someone sends you a book, especially anonomously, they are trying to tell you something.
Apparently, in light of Eaton's sudden death at the same time, among other things, this scenario bothered me enough at the time to keep the front page in one file, and the name of the book in another, for many years. Of course, it does not take much to surmise that those might be the actions of a paranoid, who had imagined himself not only the star of his own movie, which I was, but to be somehow on the end of a loose line connected to people who murdered the President of the United States.
But if I was paranoid, I wouldn't be putting this info on the web. Besides this stuff is very weak. And there are some things I would never tell, not because of Omerta or some other fear based rationale, but because of the harm it would bring to innocent people. Still, I intend to publish other, hopefully more intelligible information soon. And when you know that, then You can be paranoid. ; )
Conceive, if you will, of a society, for instance, where your car and your cell phone are automatically tracked every minute by GPS satellites, and where your every computer keystroke is bounced off another satellite and automatically routed into your digital profile in a data base somewhere far away like Israel, Austrailia, Russia, China, or somewhere more powerful and sinister like Cleveland, Ohio for instance.... where a human being with the proper clearance can access your information at any time. And every one who unwittingly visits a certain website, whether they have read the info or not... must die.
Sorry about that, I was just kidding. I forgot that acting like Rod Serling and a candidate for public office at the same time, is no good. If I was an intellectual, I would say these things are like oil and water. The two do not mix. Well... oil and water do not mix unless you first remove the gas from the water, and then shake them both vigorously to destroy the forces that hold the oil together... Ever notice that metaphors don't sound as credible when reality arrives in more complicated sentences?
At any rate, one of the several things I would still like to know regarding the Lloyd Hand letters, is this: Did Pop ask Lloyd for help after I got in trouble in Rome? Or, did Pop contact Lloyd and tell him I needed help before anything went wrong...? Or, maybe Lloyd was the one who sent me that book from Washington D.C. At any rate, I think either someone was trying to tell me something with that book, or, they were trying to throw me off a little bit. And as far as paranoia is concerned, I'm not talking here about the kind of paranoia a doper feels when he has a couple of joints and gets pulled over by the cops. I'm talking about first class, bonafide, meglomaniacal paranoia, and the folks who have a corner on that, are the ones who are now attempting to completely control the loosely knit invisible governments that run the world.
In the order of probabilities of who took me off in Rome:
Possibility Number One, confines sole responsibility to the producers, because they had the motive of collecting a lot of money from the insurance. They said the star of the movie had "a breakdown", and they collected and obscene amount of money, enough money to put the completion bond company out of business, and embark upon a series of much higher budget movies next.
Possibility Number Two: I wasn't the only so-called radical youth who was taken off by the establishment. A lot of them were. We're seeing more of that happening these days. They're just getting more discreet about it.
Possibility Number Three, is that Eaton knew too much about the JFK murder, and somebody may have thought he told me more than he did.
Possibility Number Four, is that my father set it in motion, to cure me of my rebellious attitude, and the producers went along because they profited. I would really like the closure of knowing who the hell was involved, but I don't think Pop was, because even if he had wanted to do such a thing, which I don't believe he did, it would have been much easier to do in the states, and not while I was on location in Italy.
Possibility Number Five, could have been blackmail, or a warning to my Pop, and he couldn't tell me what he was involved in, or do anything about it. I know when I finally came back from Europe, everything had dramatically changed for the worse.
Possibility Number Six, much less likely, but somewhat related to Number Four, is that a guy named Joe happened to stop by my house after he picked up the ransom money from the Sinatra kidnapping, and somebody mistakenly thought I was involved in it.
Joe was one of the Barons. I first heard of them when I was in about the fifth grade. When I got into high school and was too young to drive, a fine looking girl named Judy, who I convinced to take me to school every morning, confided one day that she had a crush on me simply because I looked like legendary Joe.
So it was weird a few years later when Joe, who had long since graduated high school, and emerged from the Navy to be a boxing champ, befriended me. I took that as a compliment. We talked about how we were going to stay in shape. We ended up getting bicycles and riding to State Beach and back several times that summer.
Joe married one of my first girlfriends Bette. I mentioned that to Dean, another one of the Barons, and he said with a wry smile that I was not the first guy to lose a girlfriend to Joe. But Dean misunderstood me. She was my girlfriend when she was 15, and not when she married Joe a few years later. They were about to have a child, and were having a tough time financially. But not in a million years did I suspect what he had done when he dropped by my house with a new brown leather sport coat and a new motorbike.
"Where did you get that," I must have said.
"Aw, I won some money in Vegas," he drawled.
I remember him standing there, shifting his weight from one foot to the other as if he really wanted to tell me something. But he didn't. He left as suddenly as he appeared, and within a few hours I got a call from my friend John from the Flywheels, telling me to turn on the TV. And there was Joe in handcuffs. It had been Joe, and a couple of other Barons, who had kidnapped Frank Jr.
Contrary to the story as it was told by the authorities, Joe apparently didn't get in and out of the Texaco station, where the ransom money was left in a blind between two busses, when it was staked out 3 ways, without picking up a tail. There was probably an electronic tracker in the money. Federal agents had been following him everywhere he went; to buy the motorcycle; and the jacket; to my place; then on to Dean's house where he dropped off most of the cash; and on to the safe house that the FBI patiently surveiled before finally closing in after Frank Jr.'s release.
Within a couple of months someone loosened the wheel of a Corvette belonging to a young man named Jan, another member of the Barons, while their cars were parked behind Goldstar Recording Studios. They both had identical new Corvettes. Within the same year, Jan's Corvette was speeding down Whittier Drive between Sunset and Wilshire one night, when it ran into the back of the only parked vehicle on the street. The impact was so loud that it awakened Gene Barry's son Michael who was the first on the scene. According to Gene and Michael, with whom I spoke, the police arrived and speculated that Jan might have been drag racing and someone ran him into the parked vehicle. The police also mentioned he was dead, which he was not.
A couple of years later, Dean Martin's wife Jeane told a few people including Jan's first wife, who in turn told Jan's mother and I, that Dino said the crash was a Sinatra ordered hit. Even though it sounds far-fetched, Jeanie Martin did not make the story up, because I asked Dean and he wouldn't deny it. But at the time, Dino and Frank were no longer on speaking terms.
Finally, I was informed that Frank learned from the FBI, that Joe had stopped by my place before going to the safe house. So at that point Frank probably thought I was involved. That's why after I was kidnapped and held unconscious for 3 months in Rome, and I learned of the Sicilian Mafia's involvement, I came to thinking of Sinatra, whose father happened to be Sicilian, and the rage he must have felt as a father.
All these years I've kept this remote possibility to myself because it makes me look bad by association, to even mention it. I've also kept silent because it was the right thing to do. There are people who were affected by the consequences and who wish to remain disassociated from such a stupid deed. And even though everyone involved, including Frank Jr., told the authorities that Joe had only gone along with it to protect him, and even though it wasn't a real kidnapping in the first place, no one else has been able to fathom the mindset of those responsible for perpetrating such a dim-witted stunt. Or was it...? As Joe always said, after he cut his deal to get out of prison within five years..., "No one is ever going to know what really happened."
But you can't blame people for trying. As time went on Joe's wife Bette went on to date one of Sinatra's closest friends, and during all the time they spent with Sinatra, she believes nobody knew she was Joe's wife... And as for Joe, one night at a place called The Daisy, he walked up to Frank Sinatra's table and introduced himself.
"Mr. Sinatra," he drawled, "My name is Joe. I kidnapped your son, and I just wanted to offer my apology to you. I'm very sorry."
Sinatra glared at him, and spoke very slowly to his bodyguards...,
"Get a good look at this guy's face...," he said.
Possibility Number Seven: Last and least, there is still another theory that often occurs to bright people, and that is that I was just on some kind of crazy bad acid trip in Rome, and the whole thing was my fault. But I'm here to tell you that is just not so. I'm a firm believer in taking responsibility for the direction of our lives. But the only thing I did wrong in this instance was going to work on that picture without bringing one of my men. The assistant director Tonino Valerii stated that everything was okay, and I was fine before it happened. A couple of years later I learned that the owners of the Villa Belvedere were paid $5,000.00 from the Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company of Chicago. I don't know if that had anything to do with me. I just don't know who the person or the persons ultimately responsible were.
When the producers first began to move me to a succession of different hotels, I became concerned and my local agent Fernando Ghia told me it was because they had learned of a kidnapping plan. Later, before I left Rome, he told me the producers wanted me to finish the movie and they had tried to intervene with their connections on "both sides". But there was nothing they could do. He said the two crew cut Marine looking clones with the van, who finally grabbed me, took orders from the CIA, but he said it was not a CIA thing. He said it was a Mafia thing. He said they sometimes worked together.
That was the same info Gordon Waller was later told. He called it a Mafiosi thing. Poor Gordon, he had no idea what he was getting into when Sharon recruited him to help. And when the two of them showed up with papers to get me out, I was rude to him because three was a crowd. Years later, Gordon remembered how I acted toward him. We laughed after he told me my attitude at the time had made him feel that maybe I was in the right spot after all...
Since there was nothing I could do about what happened, without asking for a lot of trouble, I put it aside. For many years I kept a very low profile. After all, it is like the guy who goes into a bar and starts telling everyone that his wife is terribly mean. Nobody wants to hear about it, even if they have the capacity to understand it. But I'm starting to talk about it now because it is time. That's why I've reluctantly put it here on the internet, in case someone who reads this might send me more info.
$200,000.00 REWARD
I am offering a $200,000.00 reward for any information that results in a succesful prosecution, whether against an individual, a group of individuals, or agents of government, and a $20,000.00 reward for any lead that results in closure of this incident. Also, if my campaign for public office starts to catch fire, then you will understand why I have kept my promise and completely deleted all this talk about sensational, dark and irrelevant things from the past.
Some never recover
When I got back to the USA from Europe I wasn't right. I wasn't even sure if I was the person I was supposed to be. I couldn't even write my name the same way because my hand shook. Although I still retained a strong sense of self and what I was about, I realized I had been dumbed down. I had amnesia. I was more impatient. I was always late and rushing to get places. One day a cop started giving me a tough time and I reacted in a pretty violent way. I realized later that I wouldn't have normally acted like that, and I felt sorry for myself. I felt sorry for him too. So I asked a doctor who knew about what happened to me. I asked him how long it would take for me to become as sharp as I was before it happened. He said it could take as long as 20 years, but that some people never recover.
Here I am reduced to doing a print job for some idiots who thought that Pony Skin was a cool name for a coat.
It sums up my attitude at the time.
It takes teamwork to use a manual swing stage. It is even fun in a way. But not when I got close enough to the ground to see an old friend walk by. He was very successful doing what he wanted, and I was not. So I studied up, got my own contractor's license, and started advertising in the most expensive areas.
That worked for a while, until I experienced that 15% of those who contract do so in bad faith. If you add that to the percentage of jobs that do not go right, it becomes difficult to come out ahead unless you cut corners, especially if there is a bank squeezing the numbers from the top. I also learned that contractors found ways to make more profits by paying off the government, so that often only the minimum engineering standards are required.
That is why for instance a balcony that was built to code in Marina Del Rey collapsed, because the members were only engineered to support the load, and not a whole party of people who went outside to watch fireworks. That is why the World Trade Center could have pancaked, because the structural engineering only accounted for wind and the minimum to hold the load, and not for the extra unforeseen momentum of collapsing floors. But as far as the 9-11 conspiracy claims are concerned, given the arrogant and outrageous things that governments have done in our times, openly, without regard for whether the people see their corruption or not, I suppose anything is feasible. Building 7 allegedly housed Secret Service, Department of Defense and CIA systems, so it is possible it had built-in demolition capability. But these kinds of theories will never be adequately put to rest at this point, and whether 9-11 was an inside job or not, little is going to be accomplished by focusing upon past events that could be symptoms, instead of seeking every remedy against the causes of war, corruption, tyranny and enslavement.
At any rate, I did want to point out the problem with minimum building code requirements. It is probably a flaw of mine, that made me lose interest in contracting for others, but if I cannot build it right, I really don't want to build it at all.
Some good news is that is that I got the contract to paint the Bedford Wilshire building... The device I am on is called a bosun's chair. It's just a plank with ropes and a pulley.
Life changed after the incident in Italy
My life was considerably changed after I returned from Italy. I still persevered with my plan to make music and movies, and earn enough money to run for office. Sometimes I lived at nice places like the Sunset Marquis, but in between gigs it was rough. For a long time I lived in an abandoned nightclub that is now the House of Blues.
Eventually my band got other gigs that paid for me to live at the Sunset Tower West. By that time one of my acquaintances was stashing dope under the plant near my door, and as the money ran out again, so did my patience. I loaded all the band's equipment into two taxi cabs and left with the second cab following behind. My driver got far ahead of the other cab, but I told him I did not care. I ended up losing all the equipment.
All I had left was my guitar, and a few things in the guitar case. I was weary from carrying it around. I was sitting on a bench in front of a coffee shop called Ben Franks when some fans pulled up and offered me a ride. I got in, and intentionally left the guitar behind. "Vince you forgot your guitar," they said, and I told them I didn't care.
I took a room in a fraternity house and went back to school at UCLA, and I did not tell my so-called friends where I went. It took me a long time just to start to get back on my feet after what happened in Rome. Well over ten years.
You know, it is funny how one can't seem to remember so many things from childhood, and yet retain a good snapshot of a nearly forgotten incident when there is a common thread to link it through the passage of time. For instance, I was about eight years old when I first heard something bad about Ronald Reagan.
I remember three or four boys standing on the playground and one of them said,
"Do you know what Reagan is spelled backwards...?"
"Nigger...", he said.
So that is how it starts, and in our fourth grade minds it made sense for a moment. But later, after realizing Reagan was definitely not nigger spelled backwards, it occurred to me that if someone hated Ronald Reagan enough to make a joke like that, then, there might very well be something wrong with him. Where there's smoke there's fire. You could see from his movies that he was one of those cocky, egotistical, self absorbed individuals, and I suppose not the greatest actor either, even though being a working B movie actor, which he was not, would still make for a nice living if one was capable of achieving it.
Now I am not saying he wasn't working. I'm simply saying he was not a B movie actor. B movies are the cheap black and white pictures the studios produced to accompany color feature films on double bills during the 50's, and Reagan starred in a number of first billing Technicolor and Eastmancolor features. His black and white pictures, like the football movie he was in with my uncle Pat, were mostly from the 40's when most all feature films were black and white because of the prohibitive costs of color processing and the World War II rationing of color processing ingredients. Too long an explanation? Okay then..., let's just call him a B movie actor anyway.
Nevertheless, several years later when he ran for governor, my friends and I had his number, and we did not like him one bit. We rode our horses down Rodeo Drive into the heart of Beverly Hills waving our cowboy hats, acting like jerks, and pretending we were Reagan supporters. And we were pretty satisfied with any damage we might have done to his campaign, in our own little way, by causing people to associate our obnoxious behavior with his name.
But then few years later, I returned to the states from Italy with amnesia. I had been dumbed down. I could not tell people what had really happened to me because it was so unusual that nobody would believe me. I was having a difficult time. The Department of Motor Vehicles wouldn't even give me a driver's license due to an old insurance mix up. From my perspective it appeared as if the whole damn system was rigged, and Big Brother had personally taken it upon himself to keep his boot upon my throat. So I decided to go straight to the top, which is the best place to start all things in any event, and I sat down and wrote a letter to Governor Reagan, explaining exactly why I didn't care for his politics, and how because his name was at the top of the DMV letterhead, the solution to my drivers license problem was down to him.
To my surprise, he wrote me back, and shortly I received my license in the mail. But I figured he only wrote back in the first place because my uncle Pat had showed him around when he first came to Hollywood, and of course Pop was a syndicated journalist for Hearst.
But then again, he and Pop were not friends in the slightest. As a matter of fact, Pop had written many articles promoting Governor Edmund G. "Pat" Brown whom Reagan had defeated, and he had continued to attack Reagan on behalf of government psychiatrists and other employees who lost their jobs when Reagan cut back funding for California's mental institutions. Besides, Governor Reagan had mailed his letters to my UCLA dormitory (a fancy one unlikely named La Mancha) at 930 Hillgard, and Pop would have never known about his thankless little task of public service.
So I had to admit Governor Reagan appeared to have been sincere in looking into my matter. I saw anyway that he was actually reading his own mail, and doing his job: public service. I also noticed that his budget cuts helped move the California economy out of the red and into the black. And when his own kids protested his politics, and when he could have easily silenced them indirectly, he chose to let them speak their minds.
Not the indictment of President Reagan you expected? Well then go here, and get your fill of the book Dark Victory that my friend Dan Moldea was paid to write, which is still light years more interesting among the volumes of paid for history, than let's say Vincent Bugliosi's rendition of the JFK assassination.
In any event, when he became president, I fully expected him to get the federal deficit under control as he had accomplished in California. To the chagrin of many recipients of the government programs he cut, he took the California economy out of the red and into the black. But he left the office of president with the greatest military spending budget up to that time. I suppose that is because any politician, especially the president once elected, becomes swallowed within a system squeezed by extrinsic forces, in this case the undue influences of bankers over economics, oil families over energy policy, and one of the most insidious influences upon the White House since the turning point of President Kennedy's murder, a CIA steered fundamentally against its charter as a foreign policy making arm of the military industrial concerns.
But President Reagan did not appear to make his decisions because he was afraid of getting assassinated figuratively or literally. He appeared to seek out the best in people in order to arrive at political solutions. He was no longer young and he had no political climb ahead of him that might have further prejudiced his agenda. He rightly believed that peace is best safeguarded through strength. And as far as propping up dictators or engaging in the overthrow of sovereign nations that occurred during his administration, well, he didn't invent that. It was there when he took office. It remains to this day. And what happened on his watch does not seem to be different from what all banking, energy, and military industrial powers in all countries will do when they think they can get away with it. For all the suffering that his enemies around the world allege he caused, he may have in fact done the very best he could given the tremendous pressure upon the office he held.
The moral of the story
This anecdote is not about defending or attacking President Reagan's legacy, for aside from discovering the side of him that genuinely felt obligated to assist people, I just don't have enough information to take sides. I only wanted to point out the benefit of sitting yourself down and writing a letter to your elected official, for it is that of which his letter will always remind me.
Lucky in timing
I was lucky in my timing when I arrived back at UCLA. That is volleyball champ Jim Menges giving me a set.
Jim lived across the hall from me at the Delt house. Next to Jim, lived Steve Lehto who was the pitcher on the baseball team. I was best man at Steve's wedding. I found that the athletes at school, like Jim's friend basketball great Greg Lee, were terrific people to be around. UCLA Coach John Wooden had a tremendous influence upon everyone he had contact with, and in turn, the upbeat attitudes of his athletes reflected upon their friends.
It's important to associate with people who have poise and know how to conduct themselves, and at that troubled period in my life I pursued them. I endured rejection, and I spent a lot of time waiting to be chosen to play, because I wasn't very good.
I was not cut out to have much of a career as a tennis player either.
But I was getting better all the time.
This is my great outdoors look... ; )
The cover above was part of a supplement to the Sunday newspaper, and my Mom and Pop had just seen it just before I dropped in on them. I hadn't spoken to my Pop in many years. But the advertisement made him think that maybe I was on my way to being the Harvard man and attorney he wanted me to be. We got along great and before I left, he shook my hand, and we became friends again.
They said I had totally lost it
These are the last two Vince Flaherty for Senator pens I had when my campaign ran out of gas in 1984. I gave away a free pen to anyone who would sign my petition for publicly funded elections. That would have gone a long way toward breaking Big Brother's shackles on our elected officials.
Nobody listened to me. Instead, word got back to me that people were talking behind my back. They said I had totally lost it, and was last seen down at the beach giving out Vince Flaherty for Senator pens.
That's Jack O'Brien running interference for me.
This is the last ad I did of this kind because I realized that I did not want to be responsible for promoting something that makes people sick. The same thing happened with my acting career. I turned down everything unless it was something I was interested in becoming a part of. And never end a sentence in a preposition.
One of the things that kept me going during those rough times recovering from amnesia, were the wonderful jobs that my agent used to book for me at interesting locations around the world. Coincidentally, sometimes heads of state and cabinet officials got whacked while I was there on location, and sometimes I did not remember even being there at all in the first place.
I found that the only way I was going to get the parts I wanted was to produce the films myself. Here I am in the Legend of Billy Blood, one of the films I've made in Mexico.
And, well, here is how I lost interest in working with the Producer's Plan and the Screen Actors Guild... My co-producers on a film asked me to defer my pay so they could have more funds for post production. They said if I did not, I would be sorry.
Since I did not have a lot of trust in being paid after everybody else, I declined. So the writer and co-producer wrote a letter to the S.A.G. and told them that I wasn't entitled to the expenses submitted, and that I hadn't worked all the hours on the time cards, and therefore shouldn't be allowed the credit toward my insurance plan. It was kind of lame, because one of the main reasons I did the gig in the first place was to qualify for my insurance benefit for the year.
Even though S.A.G. had the line producer's time cards proving the days I was on the set, they let the insurance company worm their way out of paying their share of the hospital costs for the birth of my number 2 son. I appealed to the S.A.G board, and I found out that I wouldn't be allowed to plead my case in person. As a matter of fact, the names of the members of the board themselves turned out to be a secret. The members of the board are a secret?
I know actors who are not interested in performing unless the pictures have redeeming value. They wait only for the right roles, so they take only enough work each year to qualify for the insurance benefits. That was one of the good things about the Screen Actors Guild and the Producer's Plan that one could count on. But when I saw the guild working with Big Insurance to worm their way out of paying benefits, when SAG members were blindsided with the closing of the Motion Picture and Television Fund Hospital and Long Term Care Unit, and when I saw that the members of the board held keeping the insurance companies happy at the expense of fairness to its members, I decided to stop doing business with the guild.
It would have been different if the board had disclosed to its members that the payments received were not sufficient to cover the costs of sustaining of the decades-old Motion Picture and Television Fund Hospital and Long Term Care Unit, but no one said a word while it was being run into the ground. There are only two explanations for that; stupidity or corruption, and that is exactly the same thing people think when they wonder how the national economy was looted in 2007 through 2011. They wonder if it could be sheer corruption, or if our electied officials and the corporations and banks that control them are just "the gang that can't shoot straight." Well, in my opinion, it is not incompetence.
There's become an increasingly distorted corporate thinking in America, that there is a sucker born every minute, so they don't care if they hurt you, because another will take your place. But they ran out of suckers recently, and it brought down the whole world economy, and the banking institutions, and the lying insurance companies with it. The only thing that saved them was their fiduciary power over the politicians they support who promptly filed up their coffers again, on the backs of the taxpayers. That event, has to be one of the the most outrageous scams, in the history of mankind.
Oh, and if you notice I'm doing a lot of complaining on here and ought to lighten up, well, I agree with you. But I did not get to choose the material for my life. Frankly I would prefer it if my story were more upbeat, like Lassie or something.
Anyway, one of the powers that everyone still has, is this: When you get ripped off somewhere and they won't make it right, whether it is a fund or an insurance giant or a monopoly bank, then take your business elsewhere. And to anybody reading this now who thought they were going to get away with burning somebody; how are you doing now? Even if you are one of the big insurance company executive officers, or the central banksters who have won for now, don't enjoy your ill-gotten gains too completely, for your days are numbered, the politicians and bureaucrats protecting you will be changed, and no amount of money, nor statute of limitations can save you.
Back in the saddle again
By 1975 I was privileged to have traveled with my friend Ray Ryan to places like London and Zurich, and to Rome a few times. Once he had invited us to go fishing with him, and it was not until we were airborne that he let us know we were bound for Alaska! And back in Palm Springs, he was sure a sight to behold when he took part in his famous Desert Circus Parade, with his Palomino horse, his silver laden saddle, his rhinestones, his buckskin fringe, and his two chrome Colt 45 revolvers . The people loved him. He was the best liked man.
But ever since he testified and got a couple of the main people from the Chicago and New Jersey mob locked up, it had become supposedly unsafe for him to ride in the parade. It made him sad. He said he might never have even testified against the would-be extortionists in the first place, if one of them had not cowardly struck him in the chest with the butt of his piece.
Meanwhile, just at that point in time when Raymond needed to have more trustworthy men around him, the opposite was happening. Funds necessary for the Palm Springs City Council and the Police were not being approved. It appeared as though some politicians were deliberately starving the local government and law enforcement. But Ray and his friends helped keep the cops going. He also spoke with my Pop, and although Pop did not appear to think so because I wasn't on speaking terms with him at the time, Ray suggested it was time I started making my own way in the world. He introduced me to the new police chief, and with a little training in Virginia, I had a new job.
It was a privilege for me to be the youngest mounted officer in Palm Springs, although I did not do it for completely altruistic purposes. I never thought I could be a cop. It was just that the opportunity came at a time when I sorely needed to associate with people who had self discipline and confidence. Also,I needed change of employment. I still hadn't gotten over what happened to me in Italy, and the years I struggled afterward living on the streets, waiting for another starring role, or performing like a rock star on the Sunset Strip one month, and then being homeless the next, and sleeping in the bottom of a boarded up nightclub that later became the House of Blues.
When Ray first got me the job, I was under the impression that the men who tried to shake him down back in 1963, and whom he finally imprisoned, were but petty criminals. But I was advised that the crewleader, a fellow named Marshall Caifano had been previously sent from the Chicago Outfit to Vegas, as their outside man. One of the other two accomplices, Charles Tourine Jr. aka Charles White aka Charles Delmonico, had allegedly laundered money through the Paradise Island Casino for a Miami based JFK hit team. And while Caifano had spent most of his life, and was destined to spend most of the rest of it, in the penitentiary ever since he tried to shake down Ryan, he didn't appear to understand that it was his own foolish and sociopathic conduct that kept him locked up. Instead, according to the stories of a cell mate and others, he was obsessed with orchestrating the hit for over 14 years. But Caifano had somewhat of a political problem with his own people. He had made a mistake by not keeping a low profile in Vegas, which got him fired, and from there he had compounded his problems by thinking Ray Ryan was going to be an easy mark.
And the thing that did not add up the most about Caifano's phony justification for the attempted shakedown, was that he was pretending to stand up for a compulsive gambler named Nick the Greek Dandolos who he alleged Ryan had cheated at cards. It became a popular story. But you know how people are. They will take as the truth catchy little stories, instead of more complex realities.
In truth:
(a) The legendary card game between Ryan and Dandolos occurred on or about 1949, fourteen years before the attempted shake-down.
(b) The reason the game became legendary in the first place, is because Caifano originated the story that Ryan used binoculars and transmitters to cheat Dandolos. The idea sounded so real that my friend Cubby Broccoli included the scenario in his movie Goldfinger.
(c) Dandolos never believed he had been cheated until Caifano explained how it purportedly happened.
(d) Dandolos believed Caifano because he ran the Chicago shops in Vegas. Just about everyone in Vegas knew Caifano was a big wheel, because he played the role, and had a reputation for murdering people in various ways.
(e) Dandolos did not know that Caifano had a second purpose aside from shaking down Ryan. He had been effectively busted from his position for acting out the role of a high profile mobster. Not only was he looking for another way to generate cash, but he no longer had any qualms of speaking about peep holes, telescopes and transmitters, tools secretively used in Vegas at the time.
Then there is also the coincidence between the fact that the attempted shake-down occurred in 1963, the year of the JFK coup d'etat, and the report of the Ryan extortion accomplice Delmonico's (aka White, aka Charles Tourine Jr.'s) association with a Miami based JFK hit team. There was the rumor that Ramond built the Bermuda Dunes Airport for the CIA, with CIA money, and that the first meeting between the mob and the CIA to plan the assassination of Fidel Castro took place there. There was the fact that some of the same players supposedly at the meeting, William Harvey, Sam Giancana and John Roselli were to various degrees involved in the assassination of JFK, and that Tourine/White/Delmonico, and later Roselli and Giancana peripherally, were involved in the Ryan crime.
But I never saw a direct connection between the Kennedy coup d'etat and the Ryan extortion, other than some of the same people were involved. Ryan and Kennedy knew each other. Both crimes occurred in 1963. Both Kennedy and Ryan were Irish. President Kennedy enjoyed vacationing in Palm Springs (six times, officially twice as president), and Palm Springs was a much safer place for the president when Ryan and his friends ran it. Moreover, IRS special agents began investigating Ryan right after the coup d'etat, in December 1963. Assistant United States Attorney David R. Nissen testified that the decision to issue subpoenas precedent to the indictment was initiated through a telephone call to his Los Angeles office from a Department of Justice attorney in Washington D.C. whose name he said he could not remember. The undisclosed Washington D.C. attorney then dictated over the telephone to Nissen's secretary, the duces tecum portions of the subpoenas, specifying the things for which they were after.
So there didn't appear to be any conclusive interrelation between the coup d'etat of the Kennedy administration, and the extortion and vendetta against Ray Ryan. But all roads led to same high places and lowlife suspects. Both crimes, were aided or abetted by some of the same people, and could be easily viewed within the context of a larger power struggle between higher adversaries. For many years thereafter, a former Chicago cop and CIA operative named Richard Cain and two of his associates, Sam Giancana and Tony Accardo, were rumored to have been against Caifano's efforts to get Ray, purportedly because of all the heat it would bring down, and they were higher up in the Outfit than Caifano, who was the little brother of one of Giancana's contemporaries. Further, as a favor to my Pop, and because of Ray's courage in assisting the FBI, Director Hoover saw to it that Raymond was protected, although in his official correspondence he had to say otherwise. As such, even though an attempted hit was thwarted and would-be hit men were imprisoned on unrelated charges, others simply didn't have the wherewithall to keep up with Ray and his itinerary. The underworld only talked about Caifano's agenda, or just pretended to him that they were going along with it, literally for years. And that is why Ray's problems didn't appear to have originated from the underworld.
We kept track of about 200 of them coming and going from Palm Springs. Sometimes characters, whom Ray knew because of his love of cards and gambling, appeared at his hotel. Tony Accardo, the alleged boss of the Outfit stayed there twice. The mayor even drove Accardo around town when he was looking for a winter residence while Ray recorded his bungalow for the FBI. Accardo eventually settled upon a home that shared the same back yard with President Eisenhower, the golf course at the Indian Wells Country Club. Although that is about all they shared, and Eisenhower's phone wasn't wired up quite the same way as Accardo's was. And all that only goes to prove, is that Palm Springs was a small town then, and people enjoy staying at the best hotels, the sport of golf, and belonging to the best club.
At any rate, I knew more about the history of Palm Springs than most people. And although I was still in the dark, and hadn't completely recovered from what happened to me in Italy, I tried to remain in a positive frame of mind. It would have been nice to have just been a cowboy like the rest of the posse. They were a great bunch of guys.
I'd smile and say 'Hi' when it was appropriate, even though most of the old timers ignored me. I figured they would realize I was a good hand and warm up after a while. And I got the chance to prove myself when we were sent out on a joint Palm Springs/Riverside County search and rescue operation. But afterwards, they acted even more as though I had done something wrong.
One day, I was riding with one of the kindlier veterans, another undercover officer named Louie, and I started complaining about it.
"Don't let it get to you," he said. "They'll figure out who you are and why you're here soon enough."
"What do you mean Louie?" I asked.
"They think you're a torpedo Vince."
"A torpedo? That's ridiculous. I don't fit the profile for a shooter."
"That's not the kind of torpedo I meant," he said. "They think you're a plant Vince"
"What?"
"Yeah, they can't figure you out. They don't know if you are for real."
"Well what do you think Louie? Do you think I'm for real...?"
He looked over at me and he said, "You don't remember me do you?"
"No I don't. Have we met before?"
"I was the Chief of Police when we brought you in for driving Ray Ryan's car without a license."
"Oh," I laughed. "Ray let me use his car before I was old enough to have a license."
"Yeah, I know," he said.
Our group wasn't allowed to wear badges or acknowledge each other in public. It was disappointing, that Ray's participation as Grand Marshall in the Desert Circus parade (shown here in an old clip from 1950 because later footage is unavailable), when he rode his horse, with his silver laden saddle, his buckskin fringe, and his two six shooters, was coming to an end for security reasons. It appeared that there weren't going to be any more parades and rodeos, like the kind they had when I was a kid. It was the end of an era, and things were not like they used to be.
I was also troubled by the $250,000 cash contribution from Ray's card playing acquaintance H. L. Hunt, that we escorted to the radio station en route to President Nixon. I was concerned with the appearance of the contribution, because it came in a shoe box. I wondered what kind of pressure Nixon had put upon Hunt to make him fork it over, or alternately, about what kind of tax breaks or future government favors Mr. Hunt might be enjoying at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer.
It was disturbing, to speculate upon the depths to which the President of the United States had to go, to get cash for the agendas within his own bubble, and how flawed a network must be to operate with such disregard for the appearance of propriety. There had to have been a better way, I mused, even though we were the right people trusted to make the delivery. But after a while, it occurred to me that the carelessness was indicative of a self-assured pattern of support for the powers that gained control of the USA on November 22, 1963. Even when Howard Hughes had made a similar contribution to get approval for his purchase of Air West Airlines, expanded airline routes, and incredible tax breaks, he had done so by making a legitimate loan to Donald Nixon's restaurant, and when Ray made investments abroad, back in the days of the Cold War, in Lira from the Commercial Bank in Zurich to business associates in Italy, he had done so believing it was in the interest of democracy. On the other hand Mr. Hunt, who had been able to hide his funding of disinformation such as the derogatory full page ad in the Dallas Times "WELCOME MR. KENNEDY TO DALLAS", could have handled this particular instrument of political motivation more properly.
This is a photo of a section of the Ocean Woods in the days when the Homeowners Association got away with using it as their park, at the expense of private property owners.
I was serving on the Community Council when people came before us and complained that the City Councilman was confiscating their land. I looked into it and found a long succession of folks, going back over thirty years, who had bought land in an area called the Ocean Woods, but were denied the right to build on it.
It appeared the Homeowners Association had a hired gun geologist who would review each landowner's project and write a negative report. I read in the newspaper that the State Coastal Commission was happy to side with the Homeowners Asscociation because the head guy was paid off. I attended the Coastal Commission meetings and saw that they never even read half the reports they voted on. Most everything was already fixed.
I met Robert Tebbe, a respected local builder, who had complete City approval for a tract of 23 homes in the Ocean Woods, only to have the Councilman deny it anyway. In his career, Tebbe had built many fine homes, as well as the Tahitian Terrrace mobile home park and the foundations for Palisades High School. Now he was no longer a young man, and he had invested all his savings into the Ocean Woods. But the Councilman had arbitrarily overruled all his permits. Tebbe sued the City and the case was mysteriouslty scheduled before a judge that was a member of the Homeowner's Association! Tebbe got a change of venue to a new judge. But the new judge ruled that he did not see a conflict of interest, and sent the case back the the Homeowner's Association judge. Tebbe was ruined. He lost everything, just like all the people who had purchased property in the Ocean Woods before him.
I said to myself, "This is America! They can't get away with this!" and I agreed to help these people build. I cut a deal with more than half the adjacent homeowners and finally the Councilman, to allow 8 homes instead of 23, thereby preserving open space and saving all the other trees in the woods. In return, I received a portion of the land for myself, with an arrangement that I would not have to pay for it until building permits were issued. It ended up being a bigger deal that than I anticipated and it took me a few years to shepherd it through.
When the City finally issued permits, the land which was worth nothing before, became immediately worth a few million dollars. Based upon that, Angelo Mozilo, the mortgage banker, funded an equity loan to build the street, underground utilities, water main, and city sewer. At least I thought that Mozilo Mortgage had funded the loan.
Meanwhile, I couldn't always get a straight answer from real estate professionals. So I studied up, took the test, and became a broker. I noticed it was just like what I had seen in the record business, in that the established brokerages wanted about half of my earnings to hang my shingle, and that was before all the other costs involved. So, a friend of mine and I started a new company, Westside Properties and we advertised to wealthy clientele.
It cost every nickle to start the business, and then we got audited because the IRS couldn't believe it. So I got to learn first hand about the tax authotities, and was dismayed to see that if a person gets on the wrong side of them there is often no due process, and no justice... even in America. And even though I learned about the real estate business, it was going to take me many more years to realize that starting in about 2003 the mortgage backed securities system, as initiated by Roosevelt and perfected by Eisenhower, once the backbone of the American economic boom years, was fast becoming nothing more than a cheap scheme, an old fashioned swindle, wherein bank representatives were deliberately aided and abetted with the highest rewards and commissions, to pre-sell, and then originate and unload the dirtiest, most unsustainable high yielding mortgages, to unwitting pension funds, and international banks and investors, in the secondary mortgage maket.
It would be years before it would hit me that government deregulation of bank monopolies, followed by their implementation of a scheme to populate and of necessity repopulate empty shell securitizations on the Secondary Market with fraudulently Triple-A rated high yielding mortgage notes; and the financial rewards, commissions and kickbacks offered their representatives to originate unsustainable loan terms in order to fulfill the terms of those bogus pre-sold securitizations, as well as the fraudulent sale of those too-good-to-be-true securities to national and international pension and investment funds and international banks, had fast become the fundamental factor, of the northern hemisphere's slow motion economic collapse. Prior to the creation of the Credit Default Swap for Mortgage Backed Securities in 2003, there had been no incentive for a large bank to originate a loan that the borrower could never repay. But once the banks discovered they could collect many times the value of a mortgage in default, only limited by the amount of insurance they bought, the avalanche of lender fraud ran unabated. In 2002 only 20% of mortgage loans were orginated with subprime terms for sale in the secondary market, but by 2007 that number had risen to 80% of all loans originated.
And the more I looked at them, the "banksters" appeared to have had no worries about being brought to justice. They couldn't have cared less if their outrageous conduct resulted in the destruction of the world economy, moral values, families, and even democracy. For after all, the members of the central bank, and their entity known as the Federal Reserve, could well afford any amount of improper influence over legislators and the corporate media. They could continue to hire the best lobbiests and lawyers, and double the salaries of their competitor's sharpest banking executives, to capture them, as well as many of America's best advertising, security and counter-terrorism experts.
There just appeared to be no end to the scope and the depth, and the patterns and interlocking practices, of the central bank's criminally influenced monopoly, and their assortment of frauds upon the judicial system, the national and international investment community, and millions of owners of private property.
I'm showing this side of the flyer because it makes me laugh. I could play a comedy about a guy who gets mad all the time.
Here I am finally on top of things.
When my knowledge of real estate came together with my contracting experience, during the times that the entertainment business was slow, things started to work out. The reason I'm on the roof is that I'm nailing on the roof sheathing ahead of the rain, and the reason I'm all alone on the job is disturbing...
Mozillo Mortgage, IndyMac and Countrywide were all started by the same family of behind-the-scenes banksters. It was our exit agreement, in accepting the land loan, that it would be paid off by a construction loan through IndyMac's Construction Lending Division, and ultimately by a permanent take out loan from Countrywide.
But in 1998, a secret central bank trading scheme started to come undone, precipitating a liquidity crisis in Russia, and a run on insider hedge funds such as Long Term Capital Management. When banks attempted to implement the protection they had purchased through derivatives, they found out that Wall Street had over pledged the same insurance to many investors. Does that sound familiar?
In other words, imagine paying for something only to find that the seller had collected the purchase price from a thousand other buyers. Imagine that someone took multiple insurance policies out against your car, then stole it and wrecked it, and collected 30 times its value. Except it wasn't your car, it was your house. That is what the musical chairs Ponzi scheme, known as derivatives or credit default swaps, is all about.
If that kind of fraud happened among people, instead of financial corporations, the seller would go to jail. But there is no jail for banks. They got away with it in 1998, and that is too bad, because if they had been held accountable, then we wouldn't have to be experiencing the recurrence of the problem that has just pulled the civilized world on a backwards path towards the dark ages.
Saw firsthand how the banks covered up the crash of 1998
At any rate, by 1998, I had enough hands on experience in architecture and construction to begin using what I thought was Mozilo's money to build estates on the land I had acquired. But a market collapse that was similarly structured to the crash of 2008 occurred. Credit markets in Russia froze. Liquidity and flexibility evaporated. Hedge funds like Long Term Capital Management were unable to conceal their insolvency. The bond market crashed, the US credit markets stopped functioning, and a swift economic tailspin ensued.
To forestall defaulting on their obligations themselves, Bear Stearns pulled their lines of credit to institutions such as IndyMac, and then IndyMac defaulted on our construction loan leaving me with a half finished house and a mob of angry subcontractors. I had been ignorant that IndyMac never really had the money in the first place and were instead using a line of credit from Bear Stearns. I had been led to believe that IndyMac was a bank.
Rather than admit what happened, IndyMac got clever. They sent a team to each construction job and then informed each borrower that the borrower was in default because IndyMac's experts had determined that the job would cost more than planned. They threatened foreclosure, but said the problem could be cured if the borrowers gave them the allegedly deficient amount.
In my case it was over $800,000. Some borrowers paid up. But thinking that it was all a big mistake, my contractor and I spent many hours trying to convince the IndyMac "experts" that all we needed was the money they owed us. I wondered why they avoided looking me in the eye.
It took over 2 years of fighting with IndyMac and doing all the trades on the house by myself, before I discovered their fraud. I took out an ad in the Wall Street Journal and found others who had been given the same treatment. But I couldn't sue, because I was obligated to retire the construction loan with Countrywide's permanent financing.
After four years spent obtaining the permits to build, I had naively believed that the task of developing the property was going to take only a year or two more, but ultimately, it ended up consuming a large chunk of my life. I would have never accepted IndyMac's construction loan if they had disclosed the material fact that they really did not have the money to loan in the first place, but were instead in the business of funneling borrowers into loan terms already set up within empty shell securitizations that had already been sold to investors in the dark secondary marketplace.
That nondisclosure was bad enough by itself, but the roots of the debacle lay within IndyMac "Bank" failing to disclose the material fact that the money they were funding for construction was subject to being cut off at any time, by unknown third party investors, in a dark secondary market, that had been slowly corrupted and turned into a casino where powerful interests speculated in a rigged game upon its failure.
Finally, to obtain the funds necessary to finish construction, I sought to apply to a real bank that would be free from concealed financial arrangements. Thus, I applied to BANK OF AMERICA, whom I trusted, and whom I believed had their own funds.
The above photo was taken at Will Rogers' ranch, by the local paper that ran a half page about a single dad and his son; me and my boy Michael Vincent. I can identify with the the symbolism of the single father Samurai comic strip hero who had to go into battle with the baby on his back. And although that would be a stupid choice, our kids do follow us in what we go through, and that kind of thing is often forced upon mothers and fathers, notwithstanding the importance of the family to society, and how important it usually is for both parents to raise their children.
This is one of the first houses I designed and built. People called it a Mediterranean design, but I intended it to be a Modern Mexican Frank Lloyd Wright monstrosity.
When this particular wall went up, and the foundation was poured, members of the Homeowners Association, in spite of the deal with previous City Councilman Marvin Braude, complained to the new City Councilwoman Cindy Miscokowsky, that nobody should be allowed to build on the lot because of a public safety issue; people in cars needed to see around the curve. This was strange, because all the other curves in this hillside area were blind, and for 75 years no one had been able to see around the curve in question, until I cleared the lot.
Nevertheless, the new councilperson called Public Works, and Public Works pushed back the setback for the house, AFTER the foundation was already in, and the construction funds for the foundation had been spent. Based upon other concerns of the Homeowners Association, Public Works also required that I build a new sidewalk all the way up the hill, and that was AFTER we had already obtained the construction loan based upon the building permit, and AFTER the line item of $389,000 had already been spent to build my portion of the roadway, a new water main, city sewer, and underground utilities.
There were simply no construction funds available to move the foundation and build a sidewalk, so once again I was in trouble with the bank, who defaulted me at the first chance, to begin charging default interest onto the property. But by now I had become a good hand at working with dread in my heart, to get through these kinds of problems.
I was forced to take a hard money loan from a lender that was betting I couldn't finish, so they could grab the property. To hedge their bet, they shorted me on construction money from the start. So I bought current law books, studied up, and I sued them. The only reason I won, was that I was lucky, because at the same time I was suing them, the FBI decided to shut down their parent, a well known insurance corporation, for running a boiler room operation that was selling worthless debentures to senior citizens.
I know a lot of people, who have been brainwashed by the big banks, their corporate run media, and out-of-touch politicians, to think that "speculators" who got in trouble with banks during the economic downturn deserve to be wiped out. But I'm here to tell you that banks put builders through hell, and that there are millions of hard working people, who were prudent, who did everything right, but whose families and lives have been, and are still being, gobbled up by the monopoly banks. Shame on our bank run corporatocracy for thriving upon such destructive policies, and for sweeping the solvable problems of the builders, the industrial, manufacturing and small businesses sectors, the future of the American middle class, and their children's children under the rug.
The number one cause of the worldwide economic collapse was not the "Subprime Crisis", nor was it the far more insidious and destructive exploitation of Collateralized Debt Obligations, Credit Default Swaps and Derivatives alone. It was instead legislators who care more about being re-elected than what happens to people, and the central bank's international securitization scheme of creating and selling an ever increasing supply of too-good-to-be-true high yielding mortgages to investors in the international secondary market, the securitization's willingness to pay the highest fees to originators of those highest yielding mortgage products, the loan originator's willingness to aid and abet their own loan officers by paying them the highest commissions, rewards and incentives for originating such product without regard to borrower affordability (which resulted in a great deal of deception, fraud, and forgery in the inception of those mortgages), the central bank’s obfuscation of the creditworthiness of the securitized loans it was selling to unwitting investors in the international secondary market (which also resulted in a great deal of deception, alteration and forgery of the original loan files), and the lack of any meaningful regulation by the central bank controlled government. By 2008, the composition of all Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS) and Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO), sold to pension funds, banks and governments around the world, had risen to 94% of so-called high yielding Subprime loans, from only 17% of such loans in 1998.
I like sports.
That pony of mine can turn on a button and never scratch it. What does that mean dad? Well son, it means he can turn on a quarter and leave enough change to buy a beer.
Meanwhile back at the ranch...
Designed this 10 ft. medallion and chose the stone. Fabrication is easier today with computer programmed water saws. If you want something like this, let me know, and I'll apply my profit to my campaign where we can really do something good.
Matter of fact, my associates can make anything you need. For instance, if you are interested in seeing an anti-gravity craft fly, and want to start with about $900,000.00 U.S., we could even have an electro-chemical-magnetic model shooting around inside the hanger within a year. Er.. a really small one that is, for that price. Another pet project is the holographic motion picture system that Andre Tierchant and I started at UCLA. If you might be interested in that, then contact our company International Entertainment Inc. My profit on these projects will help fund my campaign, and all I ask is that you support me. P.S. The International Entertainment website has been repeatedly attacked and is usually corrupted or missing much information. But if you wish additional info contact me.
And if you know the things that I do, about how world governments are being run, and if you know me, and how I barely survived being hammered by Big Brother many years ago, and thereafter kept a low profile as I worked hard making films and building fine homes and a future my family, and finally saved enough money for my political campaign, only to have the rug pulled out from under me by the secondary market securitization scheme, you would understand how world events have finally compelled me, against my first wishes, to try to do something about it. If you know these things, then you wouldn't find it incomprehensible if I told you that attorneys working for the so called Bank of America hired an analyst from The International Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, Israel, to try and stop me and my lawsuit which reveals, among other things, how they were a principal in collapsing the world economy, and that their operative who was hacking my websites and writing my Wikipedia page has now been caught and removed from overt participation against me on their behalf. You would know that not only am I facing a far more formidable threat than I encountered as a young man in Italy, but that this time I'm not going to withdraw to fight another day. You would know that we all face this threat, and it is not a threat that has much to do with the political charades between the Republicans and the Democrats, the Capitalists and the Socialists, the conflicts between the races, the thousand year old war of survival between the Christians and the Muslims, or the Radical Left and the Self Righteous Right. You would know that there is no longer any real choice between a Right or a Left, and that our only remaining choice is whether to sink or to swim, and that it has finally come down to either brotherhood under liberty, or comradeship under slavery. And that it is the banking, corporate, and military industrial congressional complex that have chosen comradeship under slavery for us.
If you saw how hard many people just like me have worked, until a small number of banksters deliberately pulled the rug out from under our future, by intentionally collapsing the international secondary market with bogus securitizations, and pushing the world economy off the edge, then, you would see why I have become committed to changing the future they have chosen for us. You would understand that things are going to get a lot worse unless my friends and I can get into the legislature. You would know why that has become one of my priorities, and you would know what a worthwhile challenge it is going to be, to prevail against those who have been awarded trillions of dollars, a virtually unlimited amount of our future taxpayer contributions, to use against us.
I know what to do. And I'm good at showing other people why they will really want to do the right thing. But admittedly, my curse sometimes is having the solutions, when nobody will listen. Oh, and not to worry. Once the campaign gets enough momentum, we will not be talking about flying saucers anymore. We will have short haircuts, and wear button down collars, if you know what I mean. So you should probably save all the information posted herein, because one day when my campaign begins to get sufficient recognition, I have promised to distance myself from contentious material herein, and delete it, and take the proverbial high road.
That's right. And one day my grandchildren will come running up to me laughing, and one of them will jump onto my knee and say,
"Tell us again Grandpa..., tell us how it was when you beat the Bank of America!"
"Yes, that's right...," I'll say,
And then I'll tell them again, about how we had a good time breaking the big banks that were ruining the world, into smaller more manageable pieces, because by that time, the story should be getting pretty good!
Thanks to everyone who promoted the last minute TV, radio and press coverage of my participation in the May 16th candidate debate aboard the Odyssey Yacht in San Pedro Harbor. Thanks to you, we had the chance to come from behind and take second place in the District 36 primary. But the fundamental reason we had a chance, was because the people I met throughout the district are simply sick and tired of voting for the lesser of evils within a running of the same old tunnel-vision or political-machine politicians.
Our campaign's most significant problem, was that the office of the Secretary of State did not certify my nominating papers and signatures until May 4, 2011, thirteen days before the election, too late to be on the ballot, and too late to be eligible for the scheduled debates, which is not to infer I was deliberately shut out, but neither to say that public officials don't do something intelligent sometimes.
We simply didn't start to get traction, with a significant number of volunteers, and donations for flyers and a TV commercial, until the week before the election, and by the eve of vote, it became apparent that my candidacy, and California's special election itself, was out of control.
According to a chart furnished after the primary by Craig Huey's people, the direction of Bowen's and Hahn's votes both took an unexpected turn in direction at the same time. Does the coincidence indicate that the big money guns (who hold District 36's corner on the so-called military industrial and national eavesdropping complex) ran a program to ensure that their ordained favorite would be the winner? Not necessarily. The coincidence would more likely be due to the time at which ballots from different areas reached the central office and were counted, which we were unable to verify. And despite other unanswered questions I have about happenings that occured duing this amazing journey as my friends helped me run for the U.S. Congress, I'm still maintaining a positive outlook. But it would still be nice to know if the votes of Marcy Winograd (D), who came in fourth but is inexplicably absent from the chart above in favor of 5th place Mike Gin (R), also took a turn at the same time as Bowen's and Hahn's.
Even if there was external influence over the election, which would be difficult to prove, and even more difficult to get the media or the courts to recognize, it still doesn't disparage the fine character of the candidates themselves. Among the frontrunners, Janice Hahn (D) hails from a fine family of courageous crusading politicians. Secretary of State Debra Bowen (D) has a terrific civil rights record, Mike Gin (R) the popular mayor of Redondo advocates removing undue influence from Washington, Marcy Winograd (D), is a sincere Peace candidate, Craig Huey (R) has a track record of assisting Christians to vote in accordance with their biblical values, and God knows we can all use a little faith... Each of them promised to create jobs and fight for small business owners. Once in office, any one of them no doubt would have been pretty good for the local communities.
But the troubles of our California economy, and even the economic and political problems of the world right now, can be traced straight back to the conduct of the ultimate masters of all of these same corporatocratic democratic and republican politicians who will continue to let us all down when it comes to the most fundamental financial issues regarding the monopolization of banking, the improper alliance between the financial sector and government, the squandering of trillions of taxpayer dollars, and the quiet catering to the dirty monied interests alligned against or in favor of their election, and who will ultimately remove them or keep them in office when elected.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not about punishing bankers, corporations, or defense contractors. We need sound banks, and we need a strong military. We just need fair laws to balance a corrupted system so that banks and corporations won't need to rely upon perverse incentives to survive. We need laws and oversight to prevent elected officials from awarding defense contracts because they have a stake in the outcome. We need laws, and bills, and acts, that will allow people, and families to thrive, rather than laws that pretend to be moral, but are inherently the opposite. All these root financial problems, these worldwide phenomena of society feeding upon itself, and the national, regional and local economic and political problems resulting from them, which are currently being swept under the political debate, can be unwound. All we need are people in congress with the courage to do more than talk about the troubles fostered by their actual masters behind Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and other related corners of extreme wealth and power.
Take a moment to read the articles I've written about what needs to be done to genuinely fix the economy. Let's get back onto the real road. And let's achieve peace through strength, and thereby avoid the largest war the world has yet seen. If you'd like to help, but do not see how, drop me a line at the Contact Us link on the menu above.
Joe Lynch, my great uncle on my mother's side, was with the Department of State forever. He may have even been there when the U.S. Embassy in London couriered Pop's observations to the Pentagon during World War Two.
Kitty and Vinnie
Pop with one of his schoolmates, Major General 
