Santo Trafficante Jr., The Florida Mobster Who Made A Startling Deathbed Confession
Dennis Caruso/NY Daily News Archive via Getty ImagesSanto Trafficante Jr. and mob lawyer Frank Ragano.
Carlos Marcello isn’t the only mobster who’s been accused of playing a role in the JFK assassination, however. Florida mobster Santo Trafficante Jr. also supposedly had a hand in Kennedy’s death. As Frank Ragano, a lawyer for both Trafficante and Jimmy Hoffa, later claimed, Marcello was the “central planner” and Trafficante and Hoffa provided “the shooters.”
Like Marcello, Trafficante had a grudge against the Kennedys. Ronald Goldfarb, a lawyer who worked for Bobby Kennedy in the 1960s, wrote in the Washington Post that Trafficante was enraged that his wife had been subpoenaed before a federal grand jury. Trafficante, like David Ferrie, also hated Fidel Castro and had even tried to have the Cuban leader killed.
So when Jimmy Hoffa allegedly raised the idea of killing the president, Trafficante was amenable to the idea of becoming a JFK assassin. “This has to be done,” Hoffa purportedly said, according to Ragano, and Trafficante and Marcello started putting the plan into action. Trafficante even reportedly told an FBI informant before the assassination that John F. Kennedy was “not going to make it to the [1964] election. He was going to be hit.”
Getty ImagesSanto Trafficante and Jimmy Hoffa allegedly provided the “shooters” in the JFK assassination.
This informant, however, was later murdered. So was a mobster named Johnny Roselli, who claimed that Marcello and Trafficante had plotted the assassination with Sam Giancana. And so was Giancana, just as the House Select Committee on Assassinations sought to interview him.
Trafficante also didn’t seem to be shy about discussing the assassination allegations. As Goldfarb notes, Trafficante allegedly toasted the president’s death with Ragano, quipping: “Our problems are over. I hope Jimmy is happy now.” Trafficante later purportedly told Ragano on his deathbed in 1987 that the Mafia eliminated Hoffa. Shockingly, he also said this: “Carlos screwed up. We shouldn’t have killed John. We should’ve killed Bobby.”
An added twist to Trafficante’s story is that he allegedly worked with the Central Intelligence Agency to try and assassinate Fidel Castro. When he appeared before the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1978, Trafficante claimed he’d worked with the CIA to assassinate the Cuban leader, saying: “I thought I was helping the United States government.”
Who Killed JFK? Theories That Cuba Or The Soviet Union Orchestrated The Assassination
Public DomainA reconnaissance image showing the construction of Soviet missile bases in Cuba.
Theories about the CIA and the mob recruiting JFK assassins are compelling, but some believe that the answer to the question “Who killed JFK?” might be found further away from home. Speculation has proliferated since November 1963 that either Cuba or the Soviet Union — or perhaps even both countries — played a role in the president’s death.
This idea emerged for two reasons. First of all, tensions had deepened between the United States and these two countries in the 1960s. Not only had the Bay of Pigs invasion in Cuba spectacularly failed in April 1961, but the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. had seemingly found themselves on the brink of nuclear war in October 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Then, the two superpowers engaged in a tense standoff over Soviet missiles in Cuba. As HISTORY details, the Soviets eventually agreed to remove the missiles if the U.S. promised to not invade Cuba. Kennedy additionally — and secretly — agreed to remove U.S. missiles from Turkey. But tensions between these nations remained high as the Cold War continued.
Public DomainAlleged JFK assassin Lee Harvey Oswald passing out “Fair Play for Cuba” leaflets in New Orleans. August 16, 1963.
And then there was Lee Harvey Oswald. The alleged JFK assassin had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959 — where he met his wife, Marina — and spent two and a half years there before returning to the U.S. Back in the U.S., Oswald was vocal about his support for Cuba. And in September 1963, just two months before Kennedy’s assassination, Oswald traveled to Mexico City where he visited both the Cuban and Soviet embassies. The Washington Post reports that he was allegedly attempting to move abroad again.
Despite this, the Warren Commission, the House Select Committee on Assassinations, the FBI, and the CIA all ruled out foreign involvement. In fact, the Washington Post reports that Cuba and the Soviet Union preferred to work with Kennedy over his vice president, Lyndon B. Johnson.
This raises another interesting possibility. If it wasn’t the CIA, the mob, or foreign powers, then who killed JFK? Perhaps the most surprising theory is that Johnson was behind the Kennedy assassination.
