Last week the National Archives released almost 13,000 new documents on the JFK assassination. Many pages were redacted and another few thousand are still under lock and key.
The good news is that this trove of information appears to debunk the Mafia hit theory, long embraced by Hollywood and mob devotees. Instead, the CIA is now in the crosshairs. Suspicions range from CIA complicity to CIA incompetence. In short, assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was well-known to the CIA and tailed everywhere he went, even to a Soviet consulate in Mexico. But our spies didn’t share with the FBI or Secret Service. The only proven Italian connection to JFK’s murder is the war surplus Carcano rifle Oswald used to snuff out the president.
For those of us raised on heroic G-men stories throughout the 1950s and 60s, even the FBI’s credibility and honesty are now in question. Late journalist Jimmy Breslin upbraided the FBI after 9/11 with an op-ed accusing the bureau of wasting agents to track Cosa Nostra goombahs instead of terrorists. The bureau has had the Hunter Biden laptop since 2019 and still deludes some into thinking it’s “Russian disinformation”.
Lately, FBI agents are being outed for not merely infiltrating right-wing action groups but funding them and egging them on. It was an old joke in the 1950s that an American Communist Party meeting of hundreds of ‘subversives’ couldn’t begin until “the real Communist arrived.”
Which brings me to another assassination, actually an attempt – the shooting of Joe Colombo in 1971. The man who founded the Italian American Civil Rights League in 1970 was aiming the League at the FBI specifically.
Colombo was born and raised in the dark world of La Cosa Nostra in Brooklyn. His bootlegging father Anthony was garroted with his mistress, mob-style, in 1938. The Feds never convicted Joe of anything other than petty crimes, but they were on him like white-on-rice. Colombo hit back by picketing FBI offices and denouncing the Feds in the media. J. Edgar never had such an adversary, and he wasn’t a man to be disrespected.
There is no question that Colombo was gunned down by a Black man named Jerome Johnson, who in turn was shot and killed by someone in the crowd (perhaps his own “escape” partner]. Why would a Black dude want to whack Colombo? That answer died with Johnson. The NYPD offered a scenario that Johnson was hired by Colombo’s arch enemy Joey Gallo, and that one of Gallo’s men killed Johnson to keep the secret. For the Italian American community, the whole sordid tale was shameful, and we accepted it as a way-too-public mob hit.
In 2012, Colombo’s son Anthony hired writer Don Capria to research and write a book on his father’s rub-out: Colombo, The Unsolved Murder. The 1971 shooting left Joe Colombo paralyzed and impaired until he died seven years later. I must say, this self-published book is well-written and documented. It examines the various theories: The Lone Gunman, The Hate Crime, The Joey Gallo Hit, The Carlo Gambino Hit, and The FBI-CIA Hit.
Johnson went to the huge Italian American rally in Columbus Circle posing as a photographer, that’s how he got close to Colombo. But why would a Black guy who was not hired by a news agency want to enter a rally of White people? Maybe it was a hate crime. In fact, the night of the event, a group calling itself the Black Revolutionary Attack Team contacted the Associated Press claiming credit. But, no one had ever heard of that group, then or now.
So, the NYPD initially concluded that Johnson was hired by Joey Gallo because Colombo was not sharing the League money. A Carlo Gambino hit was ascribed to that capo‘s fear that the League would call attention to the Five Families – wildly ironic!. The big problem with these theories is that not one gangster ever admitted, or heard within their circles, that it was a mob hit – that would include canary Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, publicity hound Michael Franzese, or Harlem gangster Nicky Barnes (the Black connection). The NYPD eventually exonerated Joey Gallo. (Unfortunately for Gallo, the Colombo gang didn’t get the memo and whacked him the following year at Umberto’s Clam House.)
So, was ‘photographer’ Jerome Johnson an FBI operative? Here’s a disturbing obituary: NYTimes (13 Sept. 2010): “Ernest C. Withers, one of the most celebrated [Black] photographers of the civil rights era: He was a paid F.B.I. informer.”
Smile for the camera, Mr. Colombo! -JLM
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