The President And the Capo

A Mofioso denies all

Q. Will you please tell the committee where and when you were born ?

A. I exercise my constitutional right to take the Fifth Amendment.

So began in traditional fashion last week the strangest session of the House committee's hearings on the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The balding, hunched-over man in the witness chair was Santo Trafficante, 63, the reputed Mafia boss in the Tampa area and former overlord of mob-owned gambling casinos in Havana.

The committee particularly wanted to know whether he had in fact told Cuban Exile Leader Jose Aleman during a 1963 conversation about Kennedy that "he's going to be hit." This was Aleman's story when questioned by committee investigators in March 1977, and it seemed to lend credence to a theory that mobsters had plotted to kill J.F.K. because of his Administration's crackdown on organized crime. But Aleman, admitting that he was afraid of Trafficante's wrath, remembered differently last week. The mobster, he testified, probably meant only that Kennedy would be hit by Republican votes in 1964, not bullets.

But the committee still wanted to hear from Trafficante. Next day, he showed up, nattily attired in a gray pinstripe suit, but refused at first to testify. Finally, handed a court order granting him immunity from prosecution for anything he might say, and faced with contempt if he did not talk, Trafficante became one of the few top-level mobsters ever to answer a congressional committee's questions.

He recalled his conversation with Aleman, but insisted he had not used the word hit. Said Trafficante: "I was speaking in Spanish, and in Spanish there is no way to say that." Had he known in advance about Kennedy's assassination? "Absolutely not. No way."

He acknowledged, however, that he had been recruited by Gangster John Roselli in the early '60s for the CIA-backed plot to murder Cuban President Fidel Castro. He joined, he said, chiefly out of patriotism: "It was like in World War II. They tell you to go to the draft board and sign up. Well, I signed up." Besides, he had a grudge to settle against Castro for closing down the casinos after seizing power in 1959. According to Trafficante, the mobsters considered "poison, planes, tanks. I'm telling you, they talked about everything." Eventually they chose poison pills, but for reasons that have not been fully explained, the would-be assassins, two Cubans, failed to carry out the plot. Trafficante told the committee that he knew nothing of any attempts by Castro to retaliate against Kennedy.

The mobster's testimony provided a melodramatic ending to the committee's four weeks of hearings. In more than 100 hours of testimony from 59 witnesses, the committee re-examined the known facts about the assassination, convincingly shot holes in the major conspiracy theories and turned up no solid evidence to challenge the Warren Commission's conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy.

In the end, the committee's performance turned out to be far more solid and thorough than anyone had expected at the outset, two years ago, when members and staffers feuded in public and repeatedly leaked unsubstantiated reports that there was "new evidence" of a conspiracy. Part of the committee's increased professionalism followed the appointment of G. Robert Blakey, a Cornell law professor, as counsel and Ohio Democrat Louis Stokes as chairman. But much of the credit must go to North Carolina Democrat Richardson Preyer, who headed the subcommittee that probed J.F.K.'s assassination. In two years as a federal judge and ten years in Congress, Preyer, 59, a Bible-quoting Presbyterian elder, has won wide respect for fairness and patience. He soothed the personality conflicts, helped stop the leaks, and set the committee to work.

Were the findings worth the $5 million spent during the investigation? Said Preyer: "It was important that something be done for the peace of mind of the country. We have succeeded in putting to rest some of the doubts. Some questions, however, never will be answered."

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