This photo is of 13 scripts, and 40 treatments for a TV/internet interactive series called AMERICA. Also in the photo is the old Wollensak tape recorder I carried for my Pop when we went to record President Eisenhower's contribution at his ranch in Gettysburg. Yes, this show has been pitched around Hollywood for a long time. But the studios thought it was a little too corny back then. However, when it was passed around last year the timing was right. It was received with enthusiasam, and more eyes ended up looking at my script AMERICA than than I had hoped for. As such, I was not surprsied when, after submiting it to the History Channel's parent studio, they came out with a similar version of AMERICA. Much of their show was identical, but it lacked the focus on how and why America had made personal success possible for millions of diverse Americans.



These are a few of the tapes Pop recorded for AMERICA, with famous Americans like Jimmy Stewart and Martin Luther King Jr. Each individual was given the same 20 questions to tell, not so much 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 dramatic series uses different A list actors and directors for each episode, and deals 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 mention both Wayne and Steinbeck to emphasize that the focus of this show does not fall into the trap of promoting a person of 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.

The trillions in federal government Stimulus money was necessary, but it was wastefully administered. Way too much of it has gone into preserving the corrupt powers of the staus 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 that they allowed to be sold to unwitting Secondry Market investors around the world. 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 administrators of the Stimulus had also looked at ways to backstop regional economics, and what a great thing it would have been, for instance, for California, and hence for the country, to see one or two major movie studios humming once again, telling a real story like AMERICA. A lot of folks make generalized statements about taking the country back. But a small part of the solution to the economic crisis in California, and hence this country, lies in taking Hollywood back.

As I write this, 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 our country, have been somehow generated despite massive blue collar unemployment, record numbers of families dispossesed from their homes, studio guilds and unions literally broken, needless squandering of federal taxpayer dollars into growing local bureaucracies, and the studios themselves operating at 38% of capacity.

I stood on the 16th floor of the Wasserman building with one of my friends at Universal, and I looked down on all the closed sound stages. I asked my friend, "What are you doing on the lot?", and he said, "The Jay Leno Show."

"The Jay Leno Show," I said, "You have this huge back lot with all these stages and resources sitting there, and all that is going on here 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," I said.

"But we will lease you these stages," he told me, "if you produce your show AMERICA here."

I thought to myself, "Why in 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... when in fact we need to turn California into a low tax state, to attract commerce and finance from all over the world...," but I kept that to myself.

Now I am not a socialist, or one to advocate the federal government ought to micro-manage private industry. But just how Private is Universal's parent GE, or their new partner Comcast, and since it was the politicians that caused this economic quagmire, and the California legislature can't fight its way out of a paper bag in the first place, why not ask someone in Washington D.C. if we can't get President Obama's administration to do something... like give their approval to a wholesome project such as AMERICA?

So I called the former Chief of Staff from the cabinet of a past President of the United States. He is now the senior partner in a Washington D.C. law firm that specializes in lobbying. I told him what I was trying to do, and I even mentioned the name of my friend at Universal. He advised me that there are laws against government funding propaganda. He said that the administration would not be inclined to bail out the studios.

Well, I am not the best pitchman, or else I would have been able to convey that AMERICA is not propaganda, 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 - get the economy of L.A. cranking.

I mentioned that the brother of the chief of staff of President Obama, through a reverse merger, recently became the president of the largest entertainment agency in the world, WME, and that WME packaged the latest Michael Moore film. I told him WME would be a natural for AMERICA, because an agency representing clients of such diverse viewpoints could be hardly be accused of fomenting propaganda.

I tried 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 I'm afraid I didn't put it that well, and with that, he asked to be forgiven. He simply couldn't talk further because he had a Marine Corps Colonel coming to dinner. I suddenly had the inescapable feeling of one who might be way over his head, and had been fortunate enough to have even had the conversation in the first place.

The next day my friend from Universal called and took me off guard. He acted annoyed, almost as if he knew I had recommended his studio to the former Chief of Protocol. He told me that this whole idea I have for AMERICA is just a non starter. "B...B...But it would be good for the country", I managed to stammer, and then I collected myself, lowered my voice, and followed that 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 banks. 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. They need to know it is possible."

"Well, maybe so," he said 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."

Last week, I sat in the office of another executive at Paramount Pictures, and again pitched this sorely needed project AMERICA. And do you know what he told me? He said, "You are not going to be able to educate people." He said, "You will never get stars like Brad Pitt to do the show."

I told him that all the stars will want to be a part of this. I explained that while many of them have long term commitments, the one week format makes availability possible. Then, he said that the corporations who run the studios are heavily invested in the status quo, and will see no need to try something new. He said it may be true that we are all on perilous economic footing, and that people sorely need a show like this, but that nobody in Hollywood is going to admit it.

He told me I was dreaming.

Vince Flaherty was raised in Southern California.  His father was a syndicated columnist and a speech writer for Senator John F. Kennedy during his presidential campaign.  It was during that time, that Vince came to view public service as the most rewarding way to be useful to other people.  He attended Santa Monica College, U.C.L.A. and Harvard where he specialized in Film and Television and Political Science.  During the past 20 years he has simultaneously maintained successful businesses in the motion picture and real estate industry and as such, has become a hands-on expert in business matters and labor relations relating to the entertainment, real estate and construction industries. 

He formerly served as a mounted police officer with the Palm Springs Police Department. He is a past councilmember of the Pacific Palisades Community Council, and credited with saving a 16-acre wooded area, known as The Ocean Woods, from a tract of 23 homes. He served the community as a representative of The Castellammare Mesa Homeowners Association.  He is a past president and director of the Pacific Palisades Historical Society.  In that capacity he assisted with efforts that led the State of California to abandon plans for a large parking lot and recreational vehicle park in legendary Los Liones Canyon, and he helped implement a program of planting indigenous trees, and restoration of the riparian stream bed in the canyon.  He is known for his community activism and his newspaper articles as an advocate for restoration and preservation of the California coastline.

No stranger to politics and California issues, he worked as an aide to Congressman Charles H. Wilson, and as an assistant in the office of former Governor Pat Brown.  He formed the U.C.L.A. Students for Carter.  He assisted California State Treasurer Kathleen Brown during her campaign to unseat incumbent governor Pete Wilson in the 1994 gubernatorial election.  In recent years, he provided his home for meetings of the Pacific Palisades Republican Club.  Since then, he has continued to contribute his efforts to the elections of Republican, Democratic and third party candidates.

He consistently donates his efforts toward helping young people, and whenever he has the chance to speak to school students or have a conversation with them he jumps on it.  He has lectured and held question and answer sessions with students in our public schools in his capacity as an authority on California History. 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 is also regarded for his efforts with youth athletics, as the coach of youth baseball, soccer and football teams, 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

Now Vince believes it is time for him to do his part to help change the way our government operates.  He believes that our government has truly lost touch with the people, and instead caters to the wishes of special interest groups and lobbyists representing large corporations.  He believes that Wall Street and the banking industry have hijacked our American government in Washington D.C. and the majority of our legislators have either ignored the conflicts of interest, or been more directly involved.  He seeks to restore our American government, that has shown itself to be a government of the corporation, by the corporation, and for the corporation, into a government that is of the people, by the people, and for the people.

PERSONAL DETAILS


by Vince Flaherty


Forward

The following are excerpts from Personal Details, a book about how current events convinced 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 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.

Another reason, for speaking out, is to correct the misperception that I chose my direction in life because I wanted to be famous, when all I really wanted was enough money to get elected without becoming beholden to others. A third reason, for speaking out, is to correct the misperception fostered by my background, that I must be a disciple of the establishment. 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 still 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.

Still, when and if my campaign picks up more steam, I am going to delete the negative, sensational and irrelevant things I have been using to attract attention. But for now, it is hoped that by presenting a complex insight, I may gain your trust.

Meanwhile, my campaign has fallen behind from where it needs to be, for me to become elected this November. Since the recent Supreme Court ruling allowing unlimited campaign contributions from corporations, the cost of buying airtime has nearly tripled. I no longer have a budget for television advertising, only limited radio, while the favorites of the establishment machine can afford public relations experts to make it seem as though they have a plan for correcting the economy. But trust me; the favored candidates do not have very good plans.

I do know what to do. I honestly do. I understand how to genuinely halt the housing crisis, restore trust in the financial system, stop the games that crony capitalists are playing with California water and energy, reduce taxes, and turn the economy around fairly quickly. I can convince other legislators of 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 much thought, about voting out the incumbents. But it is ludicrous to think that so-called irresponsible politicians can be "voted out", because the only other choices on the ballot are going to be those groomed by the masters of those same politicians.

So what can you do? Donate to help me reach more people. I can do it with a fraction of the advertising support of the establishment's politicians because I am straightforward and my solutions are actually real. Contact me right now. Speak with me. Allow 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 your efforts, or 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, until the powers that be 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 mess we are in. I have spoken with many California elected officials, and that has made me more certain that if I am 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 start having more names and connections of the wrongdoers, or it is going to 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 the real issues and solutions belong, and it will not be long before you start feeling the economic results, and start seeing the California you thought you used to know.

For after all, I am not a revolutionary. I am a reformist. The worst thing I can do, is that when the vote comes down to perpetuating the lifestyles of the elite or the government machine at the expense of the suffering of the people, the economy of California, and the future of our children, I will simply say no.

Vince Flaherty

May 5, 2010





Thanksgiving, November 26, 2009

My very best wishes to you and your family.

Thanksgiving day always reminds me of the obstacles our forefathers confronted, and the courage that made California, and America a great place. 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 Pop's side of the family, and his father, 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.

Bridget Murphy, Galway, Ireland, immigrated to the United States during the period of genocide known as the Irish potato famine. She settled in St. Louis, Missouri where she met Patrick O'Flaherty, also from Galway. 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 that he made more money than Rockefeller but 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 poor blacks, 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 Blacks 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 almost single handedly kept alive the written word, by reproducing the only remaining copies of Brehon Law, the Bible and other sacred texts.

Recently, I read somewhere, 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. They say so-called modern scholars tend to avoid using the phrase these days.

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, William F. Lacey, and his wife, the daughter of an Irish, Scottish, and English family named Wilson. My grandmother Mom Mom's mother, who they called Nana, was a Wilson.

Nana was a nice, well educated young lady, from an established family. Her great grandfather once owned farmland on what is now called Capitol Hill, and her great-great grandfather from England 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 were beset by the severe economic problems of the time. 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 their masters at 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 taxation. They just could not conceive how the sons of the original thirteen colonies could fight each other for a principle 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 really started as a conflict forced upon the States, who sought to defend their independence, and the sovereign constitutional rights of their states, from the tyranny of financially motivated federal 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. 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. The Lincoln's own young son may have been one of the victims. But that kind of information was secret.

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 in her family admitted he had struggled to do the right thing, they were still against him for 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 an 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 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 inexplicably teach that Lincoln's killer, John Wilkes Booth, was just an egotistical actor, or 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 team that orignially planned to kidnap President Lincoln during the war. And the Wilsons learned of agents who received money from the Zouaves, through Canada, to help finance a 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. Union Agent Thomas O'Flaherty and his cousin convicted conspirator Mary Surratt, soldiers of the Union and soldiers of the Confederacy, Democrats and Republicans, those aligned with the bankers and those aligned with President Lincoln and his Greenback agenda, all together in their family plot, Section 12, at venerable Mount Olivet Cemetery.




It seems like Joe Lynch, my great uncle, on my mother's side, was with the Department of State forever. He was 91 years young during World War Two when Pop used the U.S. Embassy in London to courier his observations to the Roosevelt administration.




My 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.


Football makes good citizens.




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 on par with the love that was shared by 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 visited him often at Marquette, in Milwaukee Wisconsin where he was on a Journalism scholarship, and the 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. 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 one of the greatest writers. He became a big success. 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.

Toward the end of Pop's career, after the advent of television, and after his friend William Randolph Hearst had passed away, the newspaper business, and the power of the press in general, started to decline. Bill Hearst Jr. was closing papers left and right. 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, and 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 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. 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 murdered, Pop lost the most powerful supporter he had for his project AMERICA, a wonderful project based upon conversations he recorded with famous Americans like John Wayne, and Martin Luther King. Each individual had been given the same 20 questions to tell, not so much How they 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, and a comprehensive 1,000 page journal about the relationships, and the secrets, of his powerful friends who shaped the century.

The novel reveals, among many 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, names of officials from the Union as well as the Confederacy, and their motives behind the various 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 started pro football; his service 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 Lake; his association and falling out with Howard Hughes; his unique insight into the relationships of the influential men who made ten U.S. presidents; his perspective into the politics behind the Kennedy assassinations and the people who were responsible, and more.

As one might imagine, there was great interest in this book, initially from major publishers and from studios. But then the book was also 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 700 million.

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 suppressed, and his writings have been mostly forgotten... as if they never existed.

When he passed away, I went over to the house and noticed he had modified the first half of CYNTHA. He had decided to use the real names of the people depicted. He had changed 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 ever wrote, concluded "...he had finally married Cynthia Overton."



Click here to read the Preface to the novel CYNTHIA



When Pop returned to D.C. from his college scholarship looking for a job as a journalist, he couldn't find any kind of work. It was the beginning of the "Great Depression". The world economy was in freefall, and at home the banks were gobbling up people's farms and homes. He was married, and he was broke.


Vincent X. (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 his opponent's instep and jab a thumb in 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 unsuccessfuly looking for government jobs, and many of them were All American football stars.

Without meaning to, he essentially helped start pro football. He put together a team of All Stars that travelled throughout the East, taking on the local teams. In order to make more money they agreed to play 2 games a week, which was difficult. It left them limping from one game to the next. They made the money, but at the end of their season it was also the end of their team, the Washington Senators.

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 Washington Senators team was just a temporary profit. He continued to hound the newspapers for a job as a journalist.

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 his 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, he let him have 5 minutes with Roosevelt. And Roosevelt, 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 wanted 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 in the press.







Kitty and Vinnie




To put this in perspective... my grandfather Mike ("the Old Centerfielder") who worked all his life as a printer for the government, was the youngest of his four brothers. My father (2nd from right) was also the youngest in his family, and he was also kind of old when I was born.

My point is, that spanning so many generations gives people an advantage. These gentlemen grew up in a Washington D.C. with dirt and cobblestone streets before there were cars.

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 as a pilot in World War One, and later as major in the Marines. He also pitched for the Giants and played at the opposite end of the line from George Hallas on the Chicago Bears. He fixed my dad up with a football scholarship with Knute Rockne at Notre Dame. During the 20's he married Dorothea Xaviera Fugazy the daughter of boxing promoter Humbert J. "Jack" Fugazy, who dared to operate in the day of Tex Rickard. "Pat" had a successful career running the 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.

"Pat" was very strict with my Pop when he was a child, and it left him with a speech impediment. That's why Pop became a writer. But one thing his brothers drilled into him really stuck. Never lie, and never steal. Pop took that to heart. He gained a reputation for it, and it ended up making him a success.


?, ?, Ash DeWitt, Gene Tunney, Vincent X.


Vincent X., Mr. and Mrs. George DeWitt, Kitty




When Wall Street, and the New York economy of my uncle Pat's friend Mayor James Walker crashed, it brought down his own successful company, Da Silva, Brown and Henderson, and so he moved to California to work as a producer for Joe Kennedy's 20th Century Fox. But most people had underestimated the time it would take for the economy to recover. Banks were still failing, while at the same time foreclosing on farms and homes as fast as they could. Amidst a sea of sweetheart deals, the very rich got richer, and the poor got poorer, while unemployment and poverty took on massive proportions. In Hollywood, there was a lot less financing available for pictures, and movie production ground to about 30% of what it had been. So, around 1932, Pat ended up becoming an actor, under contract to Republic Pictures. He went on to appear in hundreds of films during the 40's and 50's.




Gary Cooper, Edmund J. "Pat" Flaherty






Here is "Pat" in a film called Meet John Doe. Growing up, I was always disapointed when I saw him in movies, because he was never the lead, and I knew he was the roughest and toughest in real life.

My Man Godfrey (1936), would be one of the exceptions, because it wasn't an action film and William Powel was terrific. The thing about Pat the actor was, he did not look like a leading man, but when he took action he was powerful, graceful, and he became 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 at the start 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 did not have time to watch it, so I let it play in the background until I heard his voice at 1:07.

Around 1934, Pat was in a movie about Army Air pilots with Robert Taylor. Taylor threw a fit and 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 phony Hollywood pretty boys with their fake horses, fake punches, and stuntmen.

He made me dream that if I were an actor, I'd want to give people the real deal.


My Man Godfrey was was filmed in 1935 during the throes of the Depression, and it is certainly 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 part Pat plays is in a similar Depression oriented vien, about another hardworking citizen turned into a homeless person. At the end, Powell 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 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 part of the character he plays of the same last name, Mike Flaherty, 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 as we struggled through the Long Depression, and drifted imperceptibly, inexorably into the inevitable World War Two...


Above: General Tooey Spaatz

Meanwhile, after covering Washington for the Post and Times Herald for over ten years, the Roosevelt administration requested that Vincent X. be given the incredible assignment of living with Generals Eisenhower, Doolittle, Patton, Vandenburg, Spaatz, Quesada, Brereton, and Allen.

Officially, he worked for the Washington Times Herald, and he wrote columns about the war which were submitted through the proper channels for censorship by military intelligence at SHAEF.

But he also had been given an undisclosed task of writing a different kind of report, a report the censors never saw, that was never published anywhere, that almost nobody knew about, and was by delivered by courier from the US Embassy in London to the White House. It was common for President Roosevelt to use people in that way.

Some of the generals may have known that Vincent X. was doing a more than reporting as a war correspondent. He was checking up on them for the president. At any rate, they were very nice to him.

It was Pop's suggestion that led General Hap Arnold to change the color of the Air Force uniform from khaki to blue.




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"




With Major General Peter 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 slid the canopy back. He was yelling, "God Dammit to Hell I've broken every Damn 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 read these letters for the first time, I believe. I never noticed they were signed by generals Spatz and Doolittle.




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 Phippines eight hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Back then, even as the planes in the Philippines were being demolished, our legislators were were feeling pretty secure about America's state of preparedness.

Then as now, many of them would rather squander money on their cronies, than approve the expenses of maintaining an efficient Air Force.

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.




This is the Testimonial they gave Pop when he decided to take William Randolph Hearst's offer to relocate to the west coast.

Hearst was a 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 Newspaper Syndicate.

Finally Hearst offered him more money than any other journalist in the country, and that persuaded him. But in order to earn that salary 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.

He used to dream of what he was going to write about.




So that is roughly how Pop rose from being a poor Irish kid, to a person with friends in high places.

I know a bit about his friends. But as they say, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, especially when you do not have the whole picture.

Anyway, I shall start at the top of the list. Which is always a good place to go first...

1. General Hap Arnold, upon Pop's suggestion, changed the color of the Air Force uniform from khaki to blue.

Hap could hold his liquor with the best of them. It appears that Arnold knew President Roosevelt was concerned about his drinking, because he went out of his way to convince my father that he had quit drinking entirely. He said the war effort was more important.

He even gave pop a "shot glass" that his staff had given him, and it's no ordinary shot glass. It's not 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 the name HAP. General Hap Arnold said he wouldn't be needing it anymore.



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 a nice anecdote about him in my father's novel CYNTHIA.

3. Leslie Biffle was a highest level Roosevelt operative, a component of the glue that held not only the administration, but the whole legislature together. He was a master in human relationships.

4. Happy Chandler was the Governor of Kentucky. He appointed Pop a general on his staff. When he termed out, my father's friend General John O. Gottlieb, saw to it that he became the Commissioner of Baseball.

5. Bob Considine, a great American journalist, wrote the Babe Ruth Story, and unlike many who write biographies about people these days, 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 a pedestal that once was a 13th century jewel box. The box is made of engraved silver and was used either for jewelry or to hold the Eucharist. When Bob died the family gave it to my father. Now I have the thing. I always wonder what story the ancient jewel 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 occupants of a 13th century coach. The devil makes me think things like that.

6. Bill Corum was a terrific announcer and sportswriter. He was also the President of the American Turf Association and Churchill Downs.

7. General Doolittle was one of the generals my father 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 the first Secretary of Defense. He was an aquaintance of my uncle Leo. He was involuntarily taken away to the Bethesda Naval Hospital where it is said he committed suicide, although that is not the way I heard it.

Whew. I did not think this list was going to take so long. I'll be back to finish this list soon I hope... It's Saturday and I'm going for a bike ride.




Yes, Vincent X. might have been the inspiration for the original Forrest Gump.




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. He used that knowledge to become one of the most influential people on Capitol Hill. He understood the scope of the struggle during the Great Depression while those who were at the top of government spending programs and banks appeared to be out of touch. He was a far cry from the industrialists and central bankers who pulled the rug out from under the country, and the world, between 1926 and 1940.

When Vinson became the Secretary of the Treasury, he was part of the deliberately over-optimistic Roosevelt team that promised to bring about recovery. Sadly, while the Roosevelt administration as a whole genuinely attempted to revive the economy, there appeared to be no quick fix. They passed watershed bank regulation legislation known as the Glass-Steagall Acts, to curb, among other things, bank monopolization. Those were good acts, and should have been the 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 answered only to their own self preservation..., and to greed.

In order to right the ship of state, Roosevelt's predecessor, President Herbert Hoover, had attempted to correct the Wilson era abuses of power that favored finance and industry over the welfare of the country. But the impact of the Hoover administration's deficit spending was only equaled by the later consequences of the Roosevelt administration's 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. Meanwhile, 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 sold steel and oil to all sides of the conflict. In Los Angeles, for instance, hundreds of acres of prime Wilshire Boulevard real estate were purchased for pennies on the dollar by a few opportunists connected to the government, after the rightful Japanese owners had been taken away to camps.

If the way politicians and central bankers have behaved recently with the 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, might well have been aptly titled the "Same Old Deal" for all I know. But I do know that I studied the actions of the men of the Roosevelt administration when I was in college, and since then. I have always read everything I could get my hands on about them, and it is my opinion that President Roosevelt was no stooge or puppet of international industrialists and central bankers, as has been asserted by people looking for easy answers to complex problems. His administration did their best given the circumstances.

For instance, Fred Vinson was a stand up guy. He founded 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, at a time when our government still had a few laws, and the guts, to keep the Central Banks straight. It is usually 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 of its first chairman Fred Vinson. It is an utter shame that amidst the politics of greed, it took 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 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. There is also evidence that central bankers have often profited while 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. 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 and social 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 simply that they were good men.




Jimmy Durante, Pop, Kitty Flaherty, ?, in Chicago




It's in print, so it must be true.




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 apparently 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.




Jackie Westrope and Vincent X.


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

Here is one story nobody knows. 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.

Pretty 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 my dad could not be bought, he found out what the car was worth and sent him a check.




Second owner '49 Cadillac with big cam


My mom, Kitty, with her dog Black Magic, in a '54 Cadillac straight from the dealership in Carrolton Georgia.

Going through all these pictures has brought back memories of things I had forgotton since my brain injury in Italy; things I had forgotten entirely, or things that I thought might just be fanciful exagerations 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 of that was affixed to the dashboard.

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.




Pop 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. Someone made 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



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.







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. That's what Pop always told me. He had a speech impediment resulting from his older brother Pat being too strict with him. When he stuttered, Pat had been inclined to slap him around a bit to cure him, but it made his affliction worse. So Pop 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 wrote over a thousand words a day.

The one thing he said to me most though, whenever I asked him about the secret of his success, was "Vincie, 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 do not 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 sent their children a little further away to Central High, a school that offered advanced classes and preparation for college.

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 some 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 every yokel in the world appears 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 am not going there. 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 later recruited by Hoover while he was building the Bureau of Investigation into the organization that was later granted federal authority by Congress in 1935.

At any rate, military school was one of my Pop's gifts to me. But I did not understand it at the time. 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 just how difficult it could be to rise up though the ranks.

So I started a club with my best friends. I was 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 growing up to be like the 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.

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 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.


Danny Kaye, Sally Arthur, Bob Hope, me, and Pop


Eaton Chalkley, his daughter Mary Ellen, Kitty, Vince, Vincent X. at the Mocambo


Bill Holden, Ray Ryan, Charles O'Curran and friends, the first time I traveled with Ray.




I'd like to point out that is my Pop's old badge, and not mine. And that is not an apology, because I have my own old badge. Besides, this is 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 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 voting machines 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 good influence to help people.

What bothers me, is the current domination of the inhuman, bankster and corporatocracy controlled hierarchy in the world, and in the US Congress, who will incur any liabilities whatsoever to increase their power for the wealth 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.




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 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.




Pink Flamingos and Rabbits:

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 box arrived and it was from the Flamingo in 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 cool.

So the next morning, Easter Sunday, I saw the same little box in the trash, and I picked it up to find a pair of the most elegant cufflinks I have ever seen. They were almost the size of a quarter, a little gaudy, but well made out of slate black onyx, surrounded by a thin platinum setting, and finely inlaid with a stylish pink flamingo.

They were going to be just the right 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, and I was wearing 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 the Chicago mob's outside man in Vegas was fired for not keeping a low profile. He was looking for "walking around money", and so he and two of his cohorts, decided it would be smart to shake down one of Pop's acquaintances, Ray Ryan.

Ray seemed like he would be an easy mark because he had allegedly won a lot of money playing cards by the pool at the Flamingo, and the person he won it from "Nick the Greek" Dandalos, was purportedly 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 immediately 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 that 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 new 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 or corrupt for claiming ignorance about organized crime. Many years later, as they became more desperate, hoods of the day such as Lansky and Giancana bolstered their own prestige amongst the gullible by bragging that they had control of Hoover, because they said they had indecent photos of him. Late in life Giancana even claimed to have a key on a chain around his neck that would unlock a safe deposit box containing the dirty pictures.

I do not think such photos ever existed. But I do think that the dead have no rights, and anyone can apparently come along and say whatever they want about them. I also know that rather than disclose his methods, Hoover had to remain relatively silent amidst the perception that he was ignoring the 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 Flamingo cufflinks unspooled in Pop's mind, and now I know why the sight of them annoyed him.


Eatie 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 probably Camp Calvert, in the woods of Calvert, Maryland. The place was a replica of a stockade, with all the logs pointed at the top. It had a walkway around the top, and everything. One would have expected an Indian attack any minute. Another summer I remember going to the coast where we camped at a haunted house on the beach, and told ghost stories while potatoes wrapped in tin foil roasted in the campfire. But one year, when I was no older than nine, Pop sent down to Eaton at his ranch in a place called Sleepy Hollow.

It was the first time I ever mounted a horse, and as soon as we got onto the dirt road, it bolted and ran away with me. Holding on wasn't easy because I was on an English saddle, and pulling on the reins didn't seem to make any difference either. 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 six 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 thicket 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?", I questioned 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 already 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 in 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 that 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 department.

One day I told Pop what had happened. He basically told me the moral of the story was that sometimes people need to count on themselves, instead of waiting for someone else to save them. Then he told me a little tale 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 story of them playing baseball in the blighted streets of the District of Columbia, which I know has to be true, is that when people questioned how a man with an FBI agent's salary could end up owning a cattle ranch and the local Cadillac dealership in Carrolton, the answer was always that Eaton came from old money, a wealthy family in Georgia.

I was about 14 the first time he 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 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 there 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 gun 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 drove out and got back on the 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 only kind of info I have about what he was up to. I trust that 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 than me, also assisted him in that way. In Eaton's line of work, it was just safer for him to go in somewhere if he had someone he could trust out in the street. 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.

The official explanation for his death was Hepatitis. People have said that Eaton and Susan were heavy drinkers. But I know differently. Susan was a recovered alcoholic. Eaton drank socially. He was one of the highest level FBI guys. He worked out. He was fit. He was always sharp and alert. Admitedly, he was devastated when his son Joe was killed only the year before, when his airplane crashed into a mountain in broad daylight, the same way Dean Martin's son Dino was killed. He grieved for his only son, and as a result he was drinking more than usual. But if Eaton died from Hepatitis, it was "fast acting Hepatitis". For instance, it was speculated that at the hotel in Rome, Eaton apparently ingested Hepatitus A, a non-chronic, non-lethal virus, that becomes lethal for a person who is already a carrier of Hepatitus C.

I have seen it written by authors with 4th hand knowledge that he contracted it when he was in the Army. But there are no records of Eaton. Even if he was in the Army, which he was not, how would anyone know when and where someone contracted Hepatitis? In the course of my life I have 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.

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 involved in the Kennedy assassinations. You might even think I am paranoid. However, all this happened a long, long time ago. I had never been involved in any "bizarre" problems up to that time. I have not been involved in any "bizarre" problems since then. It was the only time in my life I have ever missed work. I feel better now that I have published it on the internet, because someday someone else might contact me and tell me what they saw happen from their 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, whether we were alive then, or not.




Above: Clark Gable, Kay Spreckles, 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 did not inherit his money. And he did not care for some of those other oil millionaires from Texas, like J. Edgar Hoover's pals, who used to walk around Washington posing like cowboys in their five hundred dollar high heeled boots. Ray was a hands on oil drilling guy who struck it rich.

One evening when I was about 14, I proudly mentioned to him that I was going on a date. For me that meant meeting a girlfriend in front of the movie theater. I don't even 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. I will never forget, the feeling I had that night, driving down Palm Canyon Drive in Ray's new silver Lincoln Continental, with black leather seats, with the top down, and my girl 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 might have even had some beer or wine, when the cops pulled us over and took us in to the station. 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 car.

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 him 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.

I suppose one of my wheels caught the shoulder, because I momentarily lost control. I ended up scraping up the whole right side of the car. When I got back I was ashamed of myself, and 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.




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.


I was just a little child when I first met J. Edgar Hoover, but I have been to his home, and through Pop's stories I have been taken back to a time when Eaton and Pop 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, 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.

I joined the subject of this FBI letter, Ray Ryan and his family on a trip throughout Europe and on to his Mount Kenya Safari Club in Kenya East Africa where I learned to shoot with a Mauser rifle and scope, among other things. The following summer I was privileged to travel to Kenya by myself, where he arranged for me to work on a game reserve. While I was there I got to meet General Jimmy Stewart. I also knew William Holden, who Ray took on as a partner to improve the image of the club.

Bill Holden has my eternal 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.

At any rate, when I was at the Safari Club a couple of years later, the place was for some reason a little empty, and one night, a lonely novelist by the name of Robert Ruark, who had written the bestselling 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 frightening inasmuch as I read it while living alone in a make shift hut 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 man who not long before had chronicled the massacre of just about every white settler in the area.

Instead, during dinner, Ruark proceeded to mimic my Pop's speech affliction and asked me, "Does he s.. s... still, s... s.., s... s... stutter?" No wonder this guy didn't have any friends, I thought to myself. Somehow it's often too late when I think of something clever to do to a turkey like that.

Anyhow, the last time I was there, I had another experience at the Mount Kenya Safari Club, that wasn't exactly the greatest either. Ray was back in the states. It must have been the off season because the place was nearly empty. After work, I showered and changed into my blazer and slacks. I went down to the lobby. It looked deserted. In the Zebra Lounge, or whatever it was called at the time, 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 bandaged 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 arms were 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 the night before. It was obvious there were interests in the club who intended to make sure that guests were treated politely.

Now that might sound like something that could have happpened in Vegas doesn't it? But that is not necessarily so. You have to remember, those were the days immediately after the bloody Mau Mau uprisng, before photo safari Africa, and the people who went in there to keep the peace, as it were, did so with an iron fist.

Meanwhile, purportedly because of the notoriety Ray had gained by testifying against the Chicago Outfit, but most likely as a follow up to the threats that he would have I.R.S. trouble if he did testify against them, rumors surfaced about the suitcases full of money that accompanied him on his travels. An apparently misguided or rogue element of the F.B.I. started building a file to substantiate that he might be laundering money or hiding income... and Ray was indicted!

Next, a federal judge found him 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 a suitcase of cash. I was about 18 when I first saw him gamble, losing about $100,000 one night at baccarat, in a private room, at a place called the Old Beach Club on the south coast of France. For him it was business. 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 the bungalow at his Palm Springs El Mirador Hotel.

Anyway, on that particular night at thge 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 desparate 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, began making a show of counting his bills one by one, from his right hand to his left, 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 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.


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.

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 the memories were real, or if they were only partially real, or partially a fabrication of my imagination.

Take for instance something that happened when I was 16, when my first car caught fire in front of school. It was not the first of my cars to catch fire in front of school...

It was just the first 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 carburetion 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 did not 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 person? 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 experiences you have to emulate are ones from the movies.


Ray Ryan in the lobby of his El Mirador Hotel

One day when I 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 gambler. Pop was very strict about with whom he associated, so the portrait had found a home 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, and was straightening it, as Ray Ryan rang the door bell.

Over the years, after Ray gained Pop's respect by testifying against the mob, his status gradually changed from being an acquaintance, to a friend. Yes, Raymond appreciated the power of money. 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 Treasury that way, and he would just peel them off. He liked things like that... and he just didn't like banks... He was a high stakes cash gambler, the tops, and that was why 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, have now been established as high ranking members of La Cosa Nostra, but the list also included some of America's most prominent politicians.

It turns out that Frank Erickson had bought memberships in the Safari Club as gifts for all those people, who included 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 people 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 and others, and he had removed the identities of the memberships that Erickson had purchased, long before he was indicted or the records were ever subpoenaed.

Raymond was proven to be a good guy after all. But the damage had been done. He could not gamble in the big games he loved anymore, because every time he did, word got back to the I.R.S. that he won a lot more than he really had.

At any rate, by 1975 I was privileged to have traveled with Ray to places like London and Zurich, and to Rome a few times. Once he asked us to go fishing with him, and not until the plane was airborne did 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 revolvers . The people loved him. He was the best liked man.

But ever since he testified and got the most feared killers from the Chicago Outfit locked up, it became unsafe for him to ride in his parade. It made him sad. He said he might never have even testified against the would-be extortionists if one of them had not struck him in the chest with his piece.

Meanwhile, just at that point in time that Raymond needed to have more trustworthy men around him, it appeared that the opposite was happening. Funds for the Palm Springs Police were not getting approved. Someone had even started a movement to disband the mounted police. It appeared at the time as though people higher up in our government were deliberately starving 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 was not on speaking terms with him then, Ray said it was time I started making my own way in the world. He recruited me, introduced me to the new police chief, and with some training, I had a new job.


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.





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.





In 1951, under the flag of heading off inflation, 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 entertainment, 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 did not 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 apparently 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." I asked, "Who was that?" 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 attract publicity. They worked behind the scenes. They even ran legitimate businesses, and others like finance companies, and banks.

More stuff he 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, 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 corrupt. 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 they bowed to the pressure of those who felt there must be something wrong, and banned Jack Westrope from racing because he was winning too much. 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 tripped and fell after being crowded into the rail. Others said his mount had gone berzerk in the home stretch, insinuating there might have been an electronic burr placed beneath his saddle. I doubt that. But let me know if someone puts the finish of that race up on the internet one of these days.

At any rate, besides being one of the people who helped keep mobsters off the track, Jack Westrope genuinely enjoyed the sport. He knew about horses. He was like Pop who liked going there every Saturday with his friend Dr. Lee Siegel. I don't blame them. It is hard to explain, but it was not 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 great 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, all made money on my tips. It is 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.




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.




Vincent X., Milton Berle, Art Linkletter, and Carl Sandburg: four good writers, with the exception of Berle and Linkletter.




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 Poulson's great acheivement. But that's the way the mop flops.




If it's in print, it must be true.




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 his successors did not make much secret of their political intentions either. But prejudicial journalism has most always been the case. The 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 that era. The Times had several high level Republican operatives, and at least one lobbyist on their payroll.




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 in front of 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.

Ed controlled the money that went in and out of the Democratic National Committee. I suppose I'm one of the few that know this these days, but Ed put Harry in office.


The memories associated with the days when this team picture was taken are vague.


But I recall six of these young football men were in my group, the Sovereigns W.L.A.



In this photo: Perkiomen School pin, Charlie Morrison's cufflinks

While most columnists avoided writing articles that unearthed scoundrels, Pop did not. He and the Hearst organization were sued when he wrote about 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 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. One day I spoke up about something Cantillon 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 did not 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 and always well groomed, and 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 specialized in Civil Law and James P. Cantillon chose 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 good friends Shirley Povich, waiting for clearance in the lobby of Tom O'Donnell's so we could get into the luncheon with JFK

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 is for sure. But I did not feel like I belonged there, in part, because many of my school mates came from well established families that were very 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 both good men, but a few Civil 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 know how much of a toll, until I dropped by his house on the southeast corner of Sunset and Roxbury, unannounced one Sunday, to get some advice. He was in the living room, apparently 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 did not 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, Johnny Roselli. They said Roselli had been involved in the poisoning of Tony Cornero, the first owner of the Stardust Casino. Roselli had been drinking that night, and he was saying the damndest things. From what I heard over the next few years, the pressure had been mounting on him, and hence his attorney, my friend Jim Cantillon. Roselli was apparently still bitter that the Eisenhower/Nixon era CIA had involuntarily recruited him, under threat of persecution by the justice department, as their liaison with his Chicago Outfit. He derisively questioned Cantillon whether they (the CIA) could expect satisfactory results from people, no matter how patriotic, who were being forced to do something. He did not say he was talking about the CIA. But now we know he was. Those were strange times. The alleged boss of the Chicago Outfit and President Eisenhower both had winter residences that shared the same back yard; the golf course at the Indian Wells Country Club... and that only goes to prove that they belonged to the best golf club.


I could not see myself in the position of being a paid advocate for a ruthless client, or throwing the case of an honest client to appease 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 to play the same 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 obedient politicians, has ended up bringing a multifaceted assortment of compound 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.


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. But I remember someone gave him a membership at the Friars Club and we never went there. So I asked him why not, and he told me there was gambling going on, which was illegal in Beverly Hills.

Sure enough, one day I read in the paper that the FBI busted John Roselli for interstate transportation of illicit winnings from peeped card games. He and his accomplices were using peep holes, telescopes and a transmitter and receiver to communicate the suits and numbers of the cards to players at the table. That was just about the time that Ray Ryan testified against two of Roselli's Chicago Outfit 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 Ray 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.

Not even criminal attorney James P. Cantillon could get Roselli out of that, 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 less person around who was tight with people such as CIA/KGB agent William K. Harvey, who was involved in the murder of JFK, and maybe then, when the House Select Committee on Assassinations subpoenaed William Harvey, Sam Giancana, Charles Nicoletti, operative George De Mohrenschildt, John Roselli and his attorney James P. Cantillon, all six would not have died before they could testify.


At the end of this clip James Cantillon, en eloquent attorney, follows his client John Roselli down the steps from the Capitol hearings for the last time.

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 two heads of the same beast, different sides of the same machine, a machine that most often places corporate, government and individual greed ahead of the good of the people. I had been studying politics for a while, and I was not up for playing along with the charade in order to get something done. 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 is for government to really serve the people, because powerful interests are always finding new ways to get around the rules, by getting to 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 total collapse of moral and ethical standards brought about by the example of our legislators allowing institutions like banks, and corporate and military interests, and not human beings, to make the rules. And back when JFK was murdered I knew we were in deep shit. He appeared to have been hit by some of our own leaders. But the teams of would-be assassins, shooters and intermediaries who were ordered and contracted to ambush him in various places and cities on his itinerary did not appear to be coordinated or connected by any central power.

They were instead a loose union of mutual interests, military generals, international corporate tax dodgers, shipping magnates, oil barons, underworld figures, career politicians, central bankers and other international cold war interests who stood to lose if JFK were re-elected and continued with the kind of legislation he had begun to repair the system. That is one reason teams came from a wide array of groups; military men, Mafiosi, and people who would work for any side as long as it pays them. Some appear to have been conversant with members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the CIA or the KGB; still others were Mafiosi with ties to the Russian/Cuban conflict, outraged at the president's decisions after he was set up for failure at the Bay of Pigs by a dual agent, William K. Harvey; or threatened by the Justice Department's crackdown on organized crime.

Some of those who could have stopped the assassination did not realize what was going on, and were simply looking the other way, while others appear to have been paid cash laundered through institutions like Castle Bank, and the Paradise Island Casino in the Bahamas, purportedly by a Chicago outfit person named Charles Tourine Jr. aka Charles Delmonico. One Corsican team coordinated by CIA/Mafia liason William Harvey lay in wait for JFK in Florida, and was paid with heroin. But many of those loosely networked elements were orchestrated with the knowledge of people within the highest levels of our government. And don't expect any light to be shed upon the truth when the sealed files from the Warren Commission are finally released to the public, for they have already been built to point a finger at Cuba, the KGB and the mob.

It was exactly the same damn thing that happened to Julius Caesar, and more recently to President Abraham Lincoln, at the hands of the same kind of powers, and it is too damn bad it was covered up, because otherwise someone might have used that overview 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, the monopoly barons of oil and international shipping, and the powers of the central bank.

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 robbing all of those converging forces, interests and political persuasions of 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, 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.


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 a most 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 appeal for the average person on the street.

Sometimes 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 after he was syndicated, his zeal for unearthing scoundrels got him beaten with baseball bats and nearly killed right on the street in the District of Columbia. They say from the swelling and the stitches that his head looked like a baseball. He never sought vengeance against those responsible. But 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 his way. Some talked about taking care of him. To that end he was forced to carry a 22 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 person, because he was a good man.

By 1962, the great power of the press 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. For a short time he was overjoyed to return to his roots in Washington. But then a few things went slightly wrong...


Now I can remember the years after the Kennedy assassination.

This is a letter 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 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 me to recall that Graham was the outspoken publisher of the Post, 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 CIA agents from the days of the OSS, 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 does not add up. When thinking about who might be behind things that happen sometimes, I always like to look first, at who profited.

For instance, 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 the 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 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 expensive and unprecedented dramatic 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.

But coincidentally, with the loss of JFK, the project AMERICA was shelved by the studios and the media. 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 Patricia Lake the hidden daughter of W.R. Hearst and Marion Davies; his problem with Howard Hughes; his relationship with the people who made eight U.S. presidents; and particularly, his personal insights regarding the private lives, motivations and connections of America's highest leaders 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 was also 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 700 million.

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 suppressed, and his writings have been mostly forgotten... as if they never existed.

Click here to read the Preface to the novel CYNTHIA


Pop and JFK

President Kennedy was restructuring the CIA. He intended to dismantle the Federal Reserve, 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, and who could have easily chosen the life of a playboy, rather than one of public service.





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 appears 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.

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 than they would have been otherwise, and a whole generation of youth dropped out, took to getting high, and abandoned, for a time, the hypocritical system that had abandoned them.

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 bank and military controlled corporatocracy.





In this photo: A note from JFK's personal secretary Evelyn Lincoln, conveying thanks for a few Saint Patrick's Day gifts.

Although I do not watch much TV, 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 may be a leading cause of cancer. But I remember 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 child, I realized it would just be asking for trouble to buck the trend and tell the school teacher that the school book was wrong, and that my family knew about the teams plotting to kill President Lincoln. Now, 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 have sold our nation down the road.





November 1963





Eaton and Susan 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. The database is called Album and the site is http://album.atlantahistorycenter.com.




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.



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 autographed a photo wishing me a useful life, and after experiencing JFK, 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 told me I was going 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.

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. Ken 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. He either knew some of the people who had been 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 of high moral character, strictly 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, those who owned large corporations with household names, and my Pop did not even own his own 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. I believed in the leverage provided by credit, 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 did not even know how to properly approach a test. I did however have a few things in common with my new friends at school. We enjoyed Political Science and History. We knew, for instance, what to do if the stock market ever crashed again like it did in 1929. Yes we did. We took a good look at that. One would think that any of us would have been able to do a better job than experts like Bernanke, Paulson, Bush or Obama. But they probably knew what to do as well... for themselves.

We saw that Roosevelt was right to sign the Glass-Steagall Act, and the three administrations during the time of destabilization had been correct to try and pump dollars into the economy. The problem back then was corruption. Not enough money ever reached the people.

JFK knew what ought to be done for his country too, much more so than most people. Some thought he got himself 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 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 would do the most good. That is why it surprised me to see JFK take on everybody at once.

Those who viewed him as reckless, or two-faced were mistaken. He may have appeared arrogant. But it was a righteous arrogance. Even so, it appeared that events pushed him to take certain positions he would have preferred to have taken one at a time, or not at all. At any rate, he was murdered, much in the same way Julius Caesar was murdered, and it had shaken 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 encomapssing form of art. So I decided to write books and music and movies. I'd produce, I'd take a shot at being a rock star, and an actor, and that way I might earn enough dough to get myself elected one day, where I could really do some good.

I let my hair grow longer. I caught on with a controversial band who were fed up with their leader. I got a recording deal with Verve, and soon we were making records... and anti-establishment statements. We were going to change the world. All of a sudden I was getting noticed for having some success fronting an a radical inter-racial rock band, not exactly what Pop had in mind for me.

Through a 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.


Daryl Dragon and me

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 had to go to 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 was back in 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 that she was supposed to have been the maid of honor at her sister's wedding that next day, and she had stood her up. But according to everyone that knew her, Sharon was a good 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. 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.

When I got to Rome, the producers moved 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. Soon I was kidnapped and kept asleep for over 3 months. They claimed the star of the movie had a breakdown, and I was informed they 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.

While I was strapped down and kept unconscious 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 must be a behavior modification technique, but at the time I also felt they were asking me questions about something I did not know, and just couldn't answer.

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 woke up on my own at least twice. The first time I awakened, I pulled the tubes out. Something must have alerted them because they rushed in, held me down and fixed me up. The second time, I was a little smarter, and managed to escape but I did not get far. Another time they awakened me and prepared me for a visitor. It was my godfather's wife Susan Hayward. We talked, but she never mentioned that Eaton had suddenly died. She never said he was dead. But there was a communication there, without saying anything. After all, she was dressed in black.


In this photo: Susan Hayward letter, page 1

This is somewhat poor form on my part to put this private letter of Susan's on the internet. 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, and the mainstream media has dutifully added it to her epitaph. But they are mistaken. John Wayne got cancer from smoking. And it appears that Susan may have intentionally been given cancer when she was sedated during the time after Eaton's death.

I could be wrong, but some of the details of what went down that winter in Italy and over the next few years appeared to be so bizarre, that the coincidences were impossible to ignore, and in my search for answers I was initially wrong about at least two things...

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 she was head to toe dressed in black. She wore a black veil, and I did not know why. It made me think that maybe she was trying to tell me something but wanted to keep her thoughts about it to herself. It was as if there was a whole conversation that was being avoided. But now I know she dressed like that for a very long time after he died, and she didn't talk to anyone about it, with the exception of our friend the Jesuit priest, Tom Brew, perhaps.

I don't remember knowing that Eaton and Susan were going to be there when I flew into Rome. All the time I was there, when the producers were trying to protect me, when I was transferred from the Excelsior Hotel, and then from one out of the way dive to the next, I did not know, or at least I do not now remember, why I was being moved around. Even after the first attempt to capture me, when I went to the closed American Embassy for help, I did not know what was behind it. I don't believe I ever 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 Fort Lauderdale 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. It took me several meetings to find out that Eaton was poisoned at their hotel, on or about the day I was captured, and she only mentioned it because she assumed that I knew. She was a person who kept to herself. She did not want to talk to me, or anyone else, about what she thought happened, because people would not understand. They would believe she was losing her sanity. And after all, what good would it do?

During all of this, she must have been frightened, but she was brave. She underwent radical chemotherapy. The last time I saw her she had just been released from the psychiatric unit where she had been involuntarily committed. She had accused them of trying to kill her. She was in a wheelchair, and she had been given Chloral Hydrate, a drug that in dosages can glue the synapses together and make it difficult to think complex thoughts. Still, she was independent. Notwithstanding all her grace and the social skills of an extrovert, she had been somewhat of a lone wolf all her life. But by the time she moved back to Beverly Hills she was inscrutable.

I would have preferred to have never mentioned any of this, for obvious reasons. Even if something good can come from the truth, it can trouble the thoughts of good people, and families. 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 that I knew had. I am not going to worry if it hurts my credibility to talk about it, or that it detracts from the positive message I am trying to convey, and the causes for which I care. No 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 it.



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 during the beginning of my stay. I also found a letter from a Mr. Kukopolous, stating the producers wanted me to finish the movie, and that it could be very damaging psychologically for me if I were not allowed to follow through with the opportunity. But it is odd. At the time those letters were written, I was locked up in a place called the Villa Belvedere Montello... and nobody, not even LBJ's right hand man, was getting me out...

No one else knew what had happened, except for my absolutely amazing friend, Sharon Sheeley, who had been tracking me. Sharon was a girl who got things done. She flew to London with an entertainer named Gordon Waller and convinced his father, a prominent physician connected to Queen Elizabeth, to prepare papers for my release into their custody.

Still it wasn't a clean release. The person in charge that night said my belongings were locked up and we would have to wait for someone else to return. But we did not wait. We got the hell out of there in a hurry, right under the noses of whoever had paid for, or given the orders, and I had to leave all my things behind. It was in the nick of time, for if I remained at Villa Belvedere Montello any longer, I might have never recovered from what they were doing.



In this photo: PER IL GUSTO DI UCCIDERE poster

When the film eventually came out, 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 wanted 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.

That evening, my agent in Italy, Fernando Ghia, showed up at the club and warned me that someone from the CIA and the Sicilian Mafia was looking for us. So we took his advice, and 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, while I tried to get my bearings and 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. She mentioned that from where she was standing, 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 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 got 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."

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.

Later, I learned that the two crew cut men who caught me, and I mean caught me, because I eluded them for a bit, worked for CIA Roma Station Chief at the time, William Harvey. Harvey had been a main CIA connection for the Mafia's Sam Giancana, John Roselli and Jack Ruby. He had also been the liason between a regiment of anti-Castro commandos that he controlled, and someone representing the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

It was further troubling that Eaton was stricken the same day I was kidnapped, and barely made it onto a plane back to the states where he died shortly thereafter. Eaton was one of the very first special agents. He had grown up within two blocks of my father and J. Edgar Hoover, and had been one of the agents who had established 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 Mafia, the CIA, and a fabled city on the banks of the Potomac, called Washington D.C.




Eaton, his daughter Mary Ellen, Kitty, Vince, Vincent X. at the Mocambo



Back in the day when the F.B.I. was struggling to survive he helped track down John Dillinger, which was the single most important event in getting Congress to appropriate the funds the bureau needed to obtain guns and badges, and 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 tracking him down.

Eaton was right out of the movies. He was exactly the kind of man the FBI liked to have. He was clean cut, but 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 along the way, and then give the car to my dad, 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 got onto him, the bureau made it appear like he was let go, although he still continued to work for them. After he married Susan Hayward, people attempted to learn more about him. They found out about the FBI, but were told he had been only a clerk, and they came away with the perception that Eaton was just a kept man.


But Eaton was a high level asset until the time he died. Among other things, he had been checking up on the agents in Florida ordered to shut down deliberately mishandled Cuban exile units. The CIA was also allegedly attempting enforce that same change in policy, but there were apparently people within all three organizations, amongst others, against it. Eaton knew that William Harvey's unit was responsible for incorrect intelligence that had deceived JFK prior to the Bay of Pigs Invasion. He must have known that JFK had removed CIA Director Dulles and transferred Harvey to Rome in an effort to contain him. In those days before cell phones, when there were only two cables running each way beneath the Atlantic, even the US Embassy in Rome could have trouble getting a phone connection to the US.

At any rate, in the aftermath of the JFK assassination, Eaton was troubled by the bureau's about face in its follow up on information they already had on Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, William Harvey and others. He knew Harvey was a double agent (CIA/KGB) with ties to the Mafia. He believed that JFK had been murdered Julius Caesar style, with the complicity of our highest officials. Notwithstanding all those things, his FBI itself had changed greatly from the days before it was a federal agency when he knew every agent by name. The bureau had been compromised, slowly infiltrated by various interests, at least since the late fifties, one agent at a time, just like former FBI agent turned CIA asset William Harvey had been turned by the Soviets in the late forties. But there could have been a few other reasons for Eaton's death that had nothing to do with any of those things.

Still, it appears a little farfetched that what happened to Eaton had anything to do with what happened to me, even though it was a multiple coincidence. It happened 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, and apparently hardly any FBI agents, just happened to be the station chief at the time. Come to think of it, it also appears that Any pro-Kennedy FBI agent might have been contained by their own bureau at the time.

In this photo: Chief of Protocol, letter
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, and that he wasn't an Ivy League guy at all. He came to Washington with LBJ from Texas. But I suppose that was just the easy way for Pop to describe him.

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. Since I was a small kid at the time, I can only surmise that I remember all these details because I have repeatedly thought about his involvement in what happened to me in Rome, many years ago.

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 guy named Frankie Carbo who dropped by the house unannounced.

The bell rang and I just opened the front door. He walked into the entry and stood there chatting me up in a soft menacing voice with all the usual questions for kids. And in his cold eyes I could see he would have just as soon eaten me.

Pop came in and took the man aside. 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 and rap sheet on Pop's desk. That is when I realized that Carbo was the man I had met. The rap sheet said "member of Murder Incorporated" so I asked Pop who he was. Pop brushed off my question by saying that he was just a guy that wanted to get involved in something he was doing, and he had checked him out, and found out he was a bad guy.

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. They should have embroidered the name on the backs of their jackets too, I mused to myself.

This rap sheet is not the one I remember seeing with "member of Murder Incorporated" on it. So that means that Pop received an FBI sheet on Carbo on at least two occasions. It appears he was keeping tabs on him. It wasn't unusuall for Pop to get people's records from the F.B.I., because he often checked people out when he was putting together groups of businessmen for projects that 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.

In this photo: Frankie Carbo Rap Sheet, page 1


In this photo: Frankie Carbo Rap Sheet, page 2


In this photo: Frankie Carbo Rap Sheet, page 3


In this photo: Frankie Carbo Rap Sheet, page 4

Let me put this in perspective. Carbo's rap sheet is a bit off topic from the subject of my problem in Italy. I just posted it in the context that children can often tell when a person is good or bad, such as when I met Lloyd Hand and I could tell he was good.

Further, the fact that Carbo was a made Mafiosi should not necessarily be allowed to provoke consternation about the implications of his unnanounced visit. Carbo was involved with organized crime out of New York. Some say he was the one who took care of Ben Siegel, but in this case it appears to me that his aggressive contact with Pop had more to do with his attempt to muscle in on boxing on the west coast.

Rocco Francis Marchegiano, aka Rocky Marciano, the only undefeated Heavyweight Champion of the World, was an admirer of Pop. He was a nice guy with a lot of guts. Rocky picked Pop to write his autobiography, and the screenplay for The Rocky Marciano Story. Both of those have never been published or produced because of Rocky and his manager Al Weil's untimely deaths in August and October 1969, and the desire of Rocky's widow to stay out of the limelight.

In conclusion, it appears that Pop and his friends made sure that Carbo was kept out of boxing, and was locked up, and stayed there, but he kept tabs on him for the rest of his life.



I do have however other less interesting files that appear more relevant to the aftermath of what happened to me in Italy. I was trying to get a handle on who was responsible. Recently, I was looking at something I had overlooked. It may be nothing. But it raises a few questions.


There is this cover page from a book that was anonymously sent to me when I was being held at the villa. 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 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.

The book was being made into a movie at Warner Brothers, where JFK had insisted that Pop write the screenplay for PT 109. I understand that JFK was very much looking forward to seeing its completion and release. What interests me is the recollection that there was no information as to the sender. I don't remember the book. I don't remember reading it. I probably wouldn't know the front cover if I saw it. I assume I left it behind because I got 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. But why did someone send me that particular book, and 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 knew where I was, that I knew, except for my folks, and my friend Sharon Sheeley, and they all said they did not send it. Also, my past experience has been that when someone sends you a book, they might be trying to tell you something.

Apparently, in light of Eaton's sudden death, 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. Now it does not take much to surmise that those might be the actions of a paranoid who imagined himself not only the star of his own movie, but to be somehow connected to a conspiracy to murder 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. There are some things I would never tell, not because of Omerta or some other fear based code, but because of the harm it would bring to good people. Still, I intend to publish other, hopefully more intelligible, info soon. And when you know that, then You can be paranoid. lol. ;-)

Conceive, if you will, of a society, for instance, where your every computer keystroke is bounced off a satellite and routed into your digital profile in a data base somewhere far away like Israel, Russia, or somewhere more powerful and sinister like Cleveland, Ohio for instance.... 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 Senator at the same time, is like oil and water. The two do not mix.

Well... they 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 do not sound as credible when they come in longer sentences?

* * *

Anyway, I had met Pop's friend, "the Ivy League guy", Lloyd Hand, and he had my juvenile approval. On up through my twenties I did not have the slightest idea he worked for LBJ, who had developed 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 a whole new light, for if he was best friends with Lloyd, he would have a lot of good in him, a good that manifested itself when his ruthlessness came together with his goals to achieve legislation in the public interest.

One of several things I would like to know regarding the Lloyd Hand letters though, 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...?

* * *

In the order of probabilities of who took me off in Rome, Possibility Number One is simply the producers, because they had the motive of collecting a lot of money from the insurance. They said the star of the movie had lost his mind. As a matter of fact, it put the completion bond company out of business, and they collected enough money to make a higher budget movie next, starring Dustin Hoffman.

Possibility Number Two, 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 someday like the closure of knowing if Pop was involved.

Possibility Number Three: 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 Four, much less likely, could be that what happened was a warning to my Pop, he couldn't tell me what he was involved in, and he couldn't do anything about it. I know when I finally came back from Europe, things had changed.

Possibility Number Five, even 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 for the Sinatra kidnapping.



Joe was one of the Barons, a high school group with a far-reaching reputation that even sixth graders like myself heard about. I remember when I got into high school and was too young to drive, the fine looking older girl who I convinced to take me to school every morning, confided one day that she had a crush on me because I looked like Joe.

So it was a little weird when Joe, who had long since graduated high school, emerged from the Navy and been a boxing champ, befriended me. I took that as a compliment. He was a legend. We started talking 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.


Years later, I heard Joe married my old steady Bette. I mentioned that to Dean, another member of the Barons, and he smiled as he said I was not the first guy to lose a girlfriend to Joe. But Dean had misunderstood me. She was my girlfriend when she was 15, and not when Joe met her.

I heard they were about to have a child, and were struggling for money. But not in a million years would I have suspected what was up when Joe stopped by my house. He had a new brown leather jacket and a new motorbike. "Where did you get that," I 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 wanted to tell me something. But he did not. Instead, he left as suddenly as he appeared. And within a few hours I got a call from a friend telling me to turn on the TV. It was Joe. Joe, and a couple of the Barons who had kidnapped the son of Frank Sinatra. Great.

Contrary to the story as it was told ever since, Joe apparently did not get in and out of the Texaco station, where the ransom was left in a blind between two busses, when it was staked out 3 ways by the FBI, without picking up a tail. Maybe there was a transmitter in the money, but somehow, the federal agents had been following him, everywhere he went; to buy the motorcycle, and the jacket, to Dean's house where he dropped off most of the cash, to my place, and on to the safe house that the FBI patiently surveiled before finally closing in after Frank Jr.'s release.

Shortly after that, someone loosened the wheel of another member of the Barons, a young man named Jan, who resembled his friend Dean, while he was inside a recording studio. Within the same year, Jan was in a tragic car accident. Years later, Dean Martin's wife Jeane said he told her, the car crash was caused by a Sinatra ordered hit. Even though it sounds far-fetched, Jeane Martin did not make the story up. But at the time, Dino and Frank were not on speaking terms anymore.

Finally, I was informed Frank Sinatra learned from the FBI that Joe had come to my place before going to the safe house. So he probably thought I was involved. That is why after I was kidnapped and held for 3 months in Rome, and learned the Sicilian Mafia was involved, I came to thinking of Sinatra, whose father happened to be a Sicilian, and the rage he would have felt as a father, if it were a real kidnapping, which it might have been.

All these years I have kept this improbable possibility entirely to myself because it makes me look bad to mention it, even by distant association. I have also kept silent because that was the right thing to do. There are innocent people all around, families, who were affected by the consequences of an incomprehensibly stupid deed. And even though everyone involved, including Frank Jr., told the authorities that Joe had only gone along with it to protect him, no one else has been able to grasp the actual mindset of those responsible for perpetrating what appears to have been such an apparently dim-witted stunt. Or was it...? As Joe always said, after he cut his deal to get out of prison in five years..., "No one is ever going to know what really happened."

But you cannot blame someone from trying. As time went on Joe's wife went on to date one of Sinatra's closest friends, baseball great, Leo Durocher, and during all the time they spent with Sinatra, she believes nobody knew she was related by marriage to Joe... 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 spoke, "My name is Joe. I kidnapped your son, and I just wanted to offer my apology to you." Sinatra glared at him and spoke very slowly to his bodyguards, "Take a good look at this guy's face...," he said.

* * *

There is yet another theory about who was responsible for what happened to me in Rome, that occurs to hip people, and that is that I was on some kind of bad acid trip and the whole thing was my fault. But I'm here to tell you that is 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 there without one of my men.

I have a video interview of the assistant director Tonino Valerii, who states that everything was okay, and I was fine before it happened. But someone had apparently paid a lot of money to hold me in that place. 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, my local agent and friend, Fernando Ghia told me it was because they had learned of the kidnapping plan. Later, before I left Rome, he told me the producers had wanted me to finish the movie and they had tried to intervene, with their connections on both sides; the government and the Mafia. But there was nothing they could do. He said the Marine looking clones with the van, who finally grabbed me, probably took their orders from the CIA, but he said it was not a CIA thing. It was a Sicilian Mafia thing.

That was the same information Gordon Waller was later told. He said it was the Mafia. 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 quite rude to him because three was a crowd. Years later, Gordon remembered how I acted toward him. We laughed when he told me my attitude had made him feel that maybe I was in the right place after all...

Since there was nothing I could do about what happened, without asking for trouble, I put it aside. For many years I kept a low profile. And that's why I've most reluctantly put it here on the internet for the time being, in case anyone who reads this can send me more info.

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.

I am offering a $5,000 reward for any lead that results in closure of this incident, and $50,000 for any information that results in a succesful prosecution.

And 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 kind of wacky talk, about stupid, sensational, irrelevant things from the past.






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.

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 weight of the 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 the Secret Service, Department of Defense and the CIA, so it is possible that it had built-in self destruction capability. But these kinds of theories will never be adequately put to rest at this point.

Whether 9-11 was an inside job or not, little is going to be accomplished by focusing upon possible symptoms, instead of exercising every available remedy against the causes of tyranny.

But I did want to point out the problem with minimum code requirements. Anyway, 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 do not want to build it.

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.



I still persevered with my plan to make music and movies, and eventually when I had enough money, run for office. Sometimes I lived at nice places like the Sunset Marquis and I appeared to have plenty of friends. But in between gigs most of them deserted me and I lived on the street. For a long time I slept 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, and I was weary from carrying it around. I was sitting on a bench in front of a restaurant called Ben Franks when some fans pulled up and offered me a ride. I got in, and intentionally left the guitar behind.

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 to start to get back on my feet after what happened in Italy. Over ten years.





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... ;-)








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.



The cover above was part of a supplement to the Sunday newspaper, and my parents 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.


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.





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 here is how I lost interest in working with the Producer's Plan and the Screen Actors Guild for the present time.

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 hadn't worked all the hours we submitted, and threfore shouldn't be allowed the credit toward my insurance plan.

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 the members that the payments received were not sufficient to cover the costs of sustaining of this decades-old organization, but no one said a word while it was being run into the ground. There are only two explanations for that; incompetence or corruption. That is exactly the same thing good people think when they wonder how the national economy was looted. They wonder if it could have been sheer corruption, or if our leaders and the corporations and banks that control them are just "the gang that can't shoot straight." Well, my opinion is that 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, then do business elsewhere. And to anybody reading this now who thought it was smart to burn somebody; how are you doing now?


Back in the saddle again

It was a privilege for me to be the youngest mounted officer in Palm Springs, although I did not do it for entirely 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 one month and then being homeless on the Sunset Strip the next, and sleeping in the bottom of the 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 ringleader, a fellow named Marshall Caifano had been sent from the Chicago Outfit to Vegas, as their outside man. I learned that the other convicted accomplice Charles White aka Charles Tourine aka Charles Delmonico, had allegedly brought laundered Castle Bank money from the Paradise Island Casino to 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 Raymond, he didn't appear to get it that it was his own sociopathic conduct that kept him locked up. Instead he blamed Ray. He was obsessed with orchestrating the hit for 14 years.

The thing that did not add up was that Caifano was supposedly assisting a gambler named Nick Dandolos who was allegedly cheated at cards. It was a popular story. But you know how people are. They will take as the truth catchy little stories, instead of more complex realities.

In fact:

(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 novel that 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, binoculars 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 JFK was murdered, and the unproven report of the accomplice Delmonico's association with a Miami based JFK hit team. Nothing suggests any connection between those things. But they can be viewed within the context of a larger power struggle.

Meanwhile, a former Chicago cop named Richard Cain, and two mobsters named Sam Giancana and Anthony Accardo, appeared to be against the hit on Ray, purportedly because of all the heat it would bring down, and they were higher up than Caifano, who was a little brother of one of Giancana's contemporaries. As such, even though one attempt to execute the hit was thwarted, and the would-be hit men were imprisoned on unrelated charges, other Mafiosi pretended they were going along with it, but never followed through. We kept track of about 200 of them coming and going from Palm Springs. The alleged boss of the Chicago Outfit and President Eisenhower even had winter residences that shared the same back yard; the golf course at the Indian Wells Country Club... and that still only goes to prove that they both enjoyed golf and belonging to the best club.

At any rate, I knew a lot more about the shady side of Palm Springs than many people. And although I was still in the dark, and hadn't completely recovered from what happened to me in Italy, I always tried to stay positive. I would have preferred to have just been a cowboy like the rest of the posse. They seemed to be a great bunch of guys, even though most of the old timers ignored me.

I'd smile and say 'Hi' when it was appropriate. But there was very little response. 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 in the car of one of the kindlier veterans, an 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 smiled.

I don't remember what was said after that.

Anyway, our group did not have approval to wear our badges or acknowledge each other in town. It was disappointing, and it was sad, that participation in the Desert Circus was coming to an end. It appeared that there weren't going to be any more parades and rodeos, like when I was a kid. It was as if we were all in a bubble, 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 Palm Springs radio station en route to Richard 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 future government favors Mr. Hunt might be enjoying at the expense of the U.S. taxpayer. But moreover, I was disturbed to realize the depths to which even 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. Even when Howard Hughes paid a similar tribute to President Nixon to get tax breaks for his corporations, he had done so by making a legitimate loan to Donald Nixon's restaurant.




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, because most everything was already decided.

I learned that one builder by the name of Robert Tebbe, had complete City approval for a tract of 23 homes in the Ocean Woods, but the Councilman had denied it anyway. Tebbe sued the City and the case was mysteriouslty scheduled before a judge that was a member of the Homeowneer's Association! Tebbe got a change of venue to a new judge. 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 taking a few years for me 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, Mozillo Mortgage funded an equity loan to build the street, underground utilities, water main, and city sewer.



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. 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, secret central bank trading 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. That is what the musical chairs Ponzi game known as derivatives 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.

At any rate, back in 1998, a market collapse that was similarly structured to the crash of 2008 occurred. Credit markets in Russia froze. Hedge funds like Long Term Capital Management were unable to conceal their insolvency. The bond market crashed, the US credit markets froze, 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.



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.

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.






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 sold 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 zombie 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. It was banking policy, banking strategy, and legislators who care more about being re-elected than what happens to people.




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...

















So what's it going to be?

Take a moment to read the articles I've written about what needs to be done to fix the economy.

I know how to fix it. I know how to change it. But I need your assistance.

The eloquent party leaders you are listening to are hardly able to change a flat tire.