01 July 2008

Respect

View this as a prologue, and if you want to imagine Aretha Franklin's magnificent voice singing the refrain from one of her classics, that is OK with me. Saves time.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T!

Do you remember the film Carrie? If you do, I can skip the background about the Brian De Palma horror film featuring the young Sissy Spacek. Suffice it to say that Carrie is differently-abled, and gets even with a whole bunch of people who treated her wrong.

The surprise ending was a novelty back in the day. A young girl is placing flowers on her grave, and suddenly her bloody hand erupts from the grave.

Something like that happened to me last week. Not supernatural, though there is always some of that going on in the background, but a hand that reached out from the 1950s, right across the years.

Everything is connected, after all, and nothing happens in a vacuum except reality shows on television. This hand was connected to the fifties and events that happened a decade before that, and reached forward into my teenaged years.

The fulcrum of before-and-after was the catastrophic moment in 1963 in Dealy Plaza in Dallas. The murder of the President seared the national psyche. I do not know what happened there, except in the broadest brush. There are questions enough about who did what to whom, and the convenient combination of deaths that followed in short order rendered the matter endlessly open to speculation.

The world does not need another JFK assassination book, and I have read enough of the fevered speculation to want to stay away from the matter altogether. The leading candidates in the conspiracy theory have brushed aside the Deranged Lone Gunman in the Book Depository and include the Mob, the Cubans, Vice President Johnson, the CIA, and the people who built the FB-111, or all of them acting in concert.

I suspect the truth is out there, in plain sight, either just as it is depicted in the Warren Commission Report, or simply buried in a tangle of lies so vast that the dots have all been cross-connected. If there is more to it all than Lee Oswald, it is concealed in the revelations of loons and conspiracy aficionados.

The rabbit holes are legion, from Oswald's Marine Corps service at Atsugi Base in Japan, where he may have known the flight characteristics of the U-2 that flew from there, to his brief stay in the Soviet Union (was he debriefed of useful information in the time between his arrival in the USSR in late 1959 to the shoot-down of Gary Francis Powers in May of 1960?

The mind reels.

What does appear to be uncontested on the historical record is that the sinking of the SS Normandie in New York forced the hand of the Navy in reaching out to "Socks" Lanza in a desperate bid to secure the ports. I do not know if the Luciano Gang had actually sunk the liner, which was to have been used for troop transport, and the uneasy alliance between Naval District Intelligence and the mob.

The support was well documented at the time, and there are even claims that Luciano was whisked out of prison and was present to support Operation HUSKY.

Luciano was subsequently sprung from jail in 1946 by his erstwhile tormentor, Gov. Tom Dewey. In addition to being the most famous loser in Presidential politics, Dewey had been a crusading DA in the mold of today’s Rudy Giuliani. As a quid pro quo for his help, he had to hold his nose and pardon the mobster.

The key proviso was that he be deported to Italy; "Lucky" immediately made plans to re-open his enterprise in Havana, which is the beginning of the Mob connection to Batista, and the bad blood between the Families and Castro, when the bearded one came to power.

The Fascists in Rome had virtually crushed the old Family organization, but they came back with vigor and the tacit approval of the Allies, for their assistance in the War. In exile, Luciano embraced the wild Corsican strain of the Family, who had been useful to the French government in the post-war struggle with the Communist groups who participated in the Resistance.

That is where the Director of Naval Intelligence comes into things. I have mentioned before that the Intelligence Community of today is nothing like it was then. There were not fifteen assorted members of the fractious tribe of secret squirrels. There were exactly three before the War: Army, Navy and the FBI. The Defense reorganization of 1947 had created a forth, the Central Agency intended to bring it all together in one place, though of course it did not.

In 1952, the Herlands Commission was attempting to get to the bottom of a number of issues about the Mob, and the Navy properly felt that full disclosure of the relationship with organized crime during the wartime years was not in the national interest. That much is now in the public record. The question in my mind is how that relationship was maintained in the years after. As you note, the wily counterintelligence pros were often off the leash when they worked their beat, and a good agent is one who knows all the players.

I think the Navy maintains that the informal relationship ceased with Luciano's deportation, but I think that the real story is more subtle.

The French Connection, which was heroin manufactured from Turkish poppies by the Corsicans in Marseilles and transshipped to New York, was a key funding source for the Mob. I make not assertion of complicity between the spooks and the Corsicans. You will be able to draw your own conclusions.

The whole thing must have been tremendously uncomfortable for those who knew the players on both sides. Police corruption was rampant. The seized evidence was later a source of income for those who wore the badge. Any one who claimed to be above the fray was either dumb or delusional.

The age of assassinations set the stage for a generation.

Baby Boomers like me were adolescents when the wave of killings began. It did not start with JFK; the murders in the South began an unsettling journey into a dark land, though contexts were different. The Civil Rights struggle is another strand that rolls through Dallas, and then the killing of Doctor King, and that of Bobby at the moment of his triumph.

No wonder a young generation was conditioned not to trust anyone. Here in DC, George Wallace was gunned down in suburban Maryland, so the mayhem was across the political spectrum, pervasive as the moist heat in the summer.

The madness did not seem to abate until the War was lost, mostly on the declining public support for an enterprise that was actually going pretty well in the field. The last of it was when Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme took her pot-shot at Gerald Ford.

Thankfully, she had not chambered the round, but 1975 marked the end of a lot of things.

Was the Manson family connected to any of this? Of course not.

The conspiracy nuts would darkly say that Ford had been a member of the Warren Commission. There are even stranger dots connected out there in the fevered conspiracy culture.

But was the Mob angry with Castro? Of course they were. Was Castro paranoid about his personal safety? With excellent reason. Were there links between the Mob and the Intelligence Community? Of course. But any connection that might have risen during the War had become radioactive, even if what formed the decade was the result of a succession of deranged lone gunmen who managed to drag us into a national nightmare.

We are all formed by our times. The Greatest Generation was forged in the privations of the Depression and forged in global war. The Flower Power generation was molded by the complacency of the Eisenhower years and jolted by the decade of war and the murders.

The kids honestly believed the mantra that you should “not trust anyone over 30.” There was too much nasty business out there. Murky forces, collaborating in unholy things. Time for fundamental change, even if the kids did not know what they were asking for, and that the impact of "Do your own thing" would rock the basis of polite society.

True or not, it was hard to have the leaders shot down in such appalling regularity.

A tantalizing factoid is that when a friend of mine was assigned to work port security issues with the NYPD during Operation TALL SHIPS in 1976, he was summoned (with his NYPD liaison officer) to meet with a quiet man at a table in a silent Italian restaurant. If he was the Consigliore of the Five Families, it was a mystery to my friend, and his amazement grew as the man graciously extended the offer of port security for the duration of the visit of the international fleet of sail. My friend reports that incidents of crime declined dramatically during the period.

I had the honor of attending the funeral of one of the last Naval Intelligence Officers who was on the famed Ferret Squad out of the Naval District Headquarters on Church Street in Manhattan.

Tony Marlsoe had also been ashore in advance of the Allied invasion of Sicily, one that was aided, and perhaps accompanied by America’s most powerful gangster.

I was interested in some of the mourners. They stood apart from the official party, dignified but apart. They did not look like Naval Intelligence people. I was left with the conclusion that someone remembered the story very well, and was showing great respect.

We have to go back a ways to connect the dots that matter. I mean no disrespect to anyone in these next few pieces. Please believe that.

Copyright 2008 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com