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Behind the Gemstone Files |
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The
Skeleton Key AUTHORSHIP ALPHA-1775 GEMSTONES A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P R S T U V W Y Z
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UPDATED
June 21, 2002 09:43 PM
Onassis, Kennedy & Meyer - Onassis & Opium - Onassis the Rebel Profiteer - Onassis the Black Marketeer - Onassis in Argentina - Onassis the Crook - Onassis the Shipping Tycoon - The Plot to Kidnap the Kennedy Children - The Mob & Opium - Eugene Meyer the Money Man - Joe Kennedy the Bootlegger - Harvard & the Drug Connection - The Rockefeller Opium Fortune The Bruce Roberts Letters, which later came to be known as The Gemstone Files (because that's what Mae Brussell filed them under and because of the "gemstone" aspect of intelligence gathering and trading mentioned by Roberts himself), actually go farther back than 1932, as popularized by A Skeleton Key to the Gemstone Files. The only two authors who are today, to my knowledge, pursuing further research (Jim Moore and Stephanie Caruana), have been forced to try to reconstruct the years before 1932, relying not on Roberts' documents - which no longer exist - but on material available in the public realm. Caruana has chosen to go back to 1920 on her promised CD (which reveals very little, actually); Moore has taken it back much, much farther, claiming that the 1932-1975 period covered in the Key is no more than a very narrow window to a much larger, broader picture of history. Roberts himself is believed to have taken it back to 1900. "You can go back to some arbitrary date such as 1932 or 1920 or even 1900," Moore says, "but it is so arbitrary that it leaves many loose ends and many unanswered questions. Just where do you draw the line? Where do you stop? And why there?"
Oil and Drugs, The Mob and the Media 1932: [Aristotle] Onassis, a Greek drug pusher and ship owner who made his first million selling "Turkish tobacco" (opium) in Argentina, worked out a profitable deal with Joseph Kennedy, Eugene Meyer, and Meyer Lansky: Onassis was to ship booze direct into Boston for Joseph Kennedy. Also involved was a heroin deal with Franklin and Elliot Roosevelt. 1934: Onassis, Rockefeller and the Seven Sisters (major oil companies) signed an agreement, outlined in an oil cartel memo: F--k the Arabs out of their oil, ship it on Onassis' ships; Rockefeller and the Seven Sisters to get rich. All this was done. 1936-1940: Eugene Meyer buys the Washington Post to get control of the news media; other Mafia buy up other papers, broadcasting, TV, etc. News censorship of all major news media goes into effect. A whole decade is covered (very inadequately) in only three brief paragraphs of the Key. There are only eight key words or phrases, in boldface type, to research, but each of them opens up a wider panorama, a larger cast of characters. How, for example, does one connect Onassis to Joseph Kennedy? Historically, it would seem there is no direct connection, so any such links must be made through the underlings of each, drawn from the broader cast of characters. One must be careful in doing this because of what I call the "Rule of Six." Any one of us can be connected to anyone else, rich or famous, in six links or less. Several years ago I saw computer software being developed for a US intelligence agency that was capable of doing this; the only thing lacking was the national (or global) database upon which to draw from. Using the "Rule of Six" you or I could be linked to any criminal, druglord or president - but that doesn't mean you or I are involved in their activities. It simply means that we are linked through "a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend of ..." This may work for some conspiracy theorists, but if it is a factor it should be noted, so that innocents are not lumped together with the guilty by mistake. Let's look first at Onassis. Two claims are made immediately - he is a Greek drug pusher and a ship owner. In truth, Onassis was not even a Greek. He was born in the Greek section of Smyrna on the west coast of Turkey January 20, 1906, making him a Turk of Greek descent. (1) Certainly he was a ship owner and a very famous one, as documented in literally thousands of published sources. Having to document that would be like having to document that George Washington was an American president. But what about the charge that he was a "drug pusher" peddling "Turkish tobacco aka opium" in Argentina and later the United States? Is there any evidence at all connecting Onassis to opium? Fortunately for Roberts' credibility, there is, but one has to go farther back in time than 1932 to find it. "The railways made the produce of the Anatolian interior accessible to the affluent West and in turn provided a new export market. Smyrna became a boom town, with its Greek traders sending the produce of the Ottoman Empire - cotton, hides, tobacco, opium, figs, raisins, barley, olive oil and carpets - throughout the world by means of the growing Greek merchant marine. (1) In this one paragraph, we have found several key links - tobacco, opium, export, the affluent West and Greek merchant marine. Smyrna merchants clearly exported these products to the affluent Western market, using shipping to do it. Opium at the time was not an illegal substance. Its use was widely promoted and advertised in America in the first third of the 20th Century, as was cocaine. Children could buy cocaine over the counter in soft drinks (Coca Cola). Onassis was not some poor impoverished child, as he liked the world to think, since it boosted his "rags to riches" image. His father, Socrates Onassis, was a wealthy banker, chairman of the local bank and hospital. Socrates was one of 11 children, but apparently only six survived into adulthood. By age, they were: John, Socrates, Basil, Alexander, Homer and Maria. "His father, Socrates, was one of the richest citizens of Smyrna, which in those days was one of the richest cities of the eastern Mediterranean." (1) Socrates was the second child, but first son, born in 1878. By the time Aristotle was born in 1906 he was a wealthy young man of 28; his life indeed was a "rags to riches" story. He married in 1904 and Aristotle was born two years later.
"The family 'office' was in Vezir Hane, a long, curving street in the bedesten - a covered oriental market which was the hub of Smyrna's teeming merchant quarter and which lay between the Greek Orthodox Church of Ayia Fotini and the prosperous quarter of Yalyadika," writes the Sunday London Times team in the 1977 book Aristotle Onassis. "It was not exactly a warehouse in the Western sense since the goods were on full display, spilling in their profusion out into the streets - sacks of raisins and currants, tobacco, figs, balls of raw opium, and piles of hides." Nicholas Fraser and his team writes that there was never enough room in the large, square, ground-floor room for all of Socrates' wares and him and his three helpers. Fraser further notes that the Onassis business was wholesale, not retail, providing a few more clues. "It was what today would be called an export-import agency," Fraser writes. Now, the historical biographies of Onassis, with the information tightly controlled by Aristotle in later years, never specifically says the Onassis family exported opium, but since there was a growing export demand for it in America, and good money to be made - all quite legally, there's no reason to presume they didn't either. Why shouldn't they? Turkey was the world's leading supplier of opium and heroin. In the United States, opium products constituted the largest single source of newspaper advertising until it was made illegal. (2) In analyzing the "criminal mind," the profiler must look at the suspect's "propensity" for committing a crime as well as the means. Early clues in Aristotle's (Ari's) life show he had the propensity toward crime. He was so incorrigible, his father once told a friend, Michael Avramedis, "I feel like committing suicide because of him." He was always in trouble, committing outrageous pranks, thrown out of school after school, until his father didn't know what to do with him and turned to Avramedis for help. Ari, also called Aristo, lost his mother to kidney disease when he was six, and was raised mainly by his grandmother. Small and lonely, he feared his father, who had a presence that intimidated everyone. Like his children would do later with Jackie Kennedy Onassis, he regarded his new stepmother, Helen, with bitterness and anger. Onassis the Rebel Profit-Maker At the early age of eight, Aristo had developed a keen sense of money that could have developed into a later greed that would propel him to do the kinds of things he is accused of doing in the Roberts Letters. There was a brief craze in the neighborhood for making toy windmills of a paper sail attached to a stick with a pin. One his friends decided to go into production and Aristo was one of his first prospects. "How much?" Aristo demanded. "Um, er ... one pin?" the friend replied. "Nitwit," stormed Aristo. "You give me a pin, plus the paper, plus a piece of wood, plus your labor when you give me that windmill. You're crazy asking for just a pin in exchange. You make a loss." "And so," concluded that childhood friend, Michael Anastasiades, "I had my first lesson in the meaning of profit." [Anastasiades later went on to become a professor of electronic physics in Athens; Aristo went on to become one of the richest men in the world.] (1) He talked back to his mother, despite his father's strict disciplinarian nature, and was considered a "hardened truant", always playing hooky. At 13, it got so bad he was exiled to a neighbor's home for a year. He was considered as a rebel who would either grow up to become a hardened criminal or a very wealthy man. He may have been both. In 1922, Aristo failed to graduate, as he expected, and a friend told him to cheer up, there was always next year, to which Aristo replied, "Idiot, do you think I am going to hang around this piddling town? For me, the whole world is small. I don't need any diploma. You will marvel one day at what I shall do." In World War I, Turkey joined Germany and after the war ended, the Onassis family fortune was devastated and nearly penniless,. The year 1922 was not a good one. The Turkish Army invaded the now-Greek Smyrna and slaughter swept across the city. Greek bodies were hanging from the trees like grapes, and the severed heads of young Greek girls floated in the river, tied together by their hair like clusters of coconuts. Aristo's father was imprisoned for his pro-Greek, anti-Turk sentiments. Two of Aristo's uncles were treasurers of a local separatist movement, and prime Turkish targets. When the Turks took over the Onassis residence, Aristo stayed and went to work for them, explaining, "You usually find that if you make things comfortable for people, they like you." When the Turkish commander-in-chief banned liquor, his soldiers turned to the black market - and there Aristo got his first taste of the same world he may have later ruled. With a Turkish officer in tow, he made the rounds of his father's business friends, seeking liquor, but the venture was a disaster. They weren't about to speak with the hated Turk present. The next day, US vice-consul James Loden Park was helping one of Aristo's teachers pack for evacuation, and asked Aristo where he could find some liquor. They made the rounds of the city and made a successful haul of three gallons of raki and several bottles of scotch. Most of it went to the US Navy. For his reward, Aristo was given a bottle of scotch and a pass that allowed him entry into the heavily-guarded US Marine zone. Aristo took the scotch and gave it to his Turkish friends; they gave him yet another pass, allowing him free access to the whole city. Aristotle Onassis, the bootlegger, was born. Even curfew didn't affect him. Later, when a Turk friend of his father's was allowed entry into the Onassis office to retrieve some of his own property he had left there (stocks, bonds and a box of jewelry), Aristo boldly asked if he could remove some of his father's money from the safe - and walked out with $10,000. He took the money and left for Lesbos, where the Onassis women were stranded and broke. Before leaving, he slipped his father some cigarettes and 500 Turkish pounds (about $2,000), but he was seen and held for interrogation. Luckily for him, the commandant was suddenly called away and Aristo walked out of the compound and fled to the Hotel Majestic where his US vice-consul buddy was; he hid him in a rolltop desk, then hustled him aboard the USS Edsall, destroyer 219, and shipped him off to Lesbos posing as an American sailor. Aristo experienced the power that being a good bootlegger can bring; it had quite literally saved his life. When Aristo got off the US ship, it was the first time he had ever set foot on Greek soil. His beloved grandmother had fought off a pack of thieves disembarking and fell and died. Aristo began to hate everything Greek, even though after he was successful he always referred to himself as Greek, not Turk. After the Onassis family won the release of Socrates, he and his son had a bitter falling out over what had happened to the $10,000. Angry, broke and rejected, Aristo sailed for Argentina, arriving September 21, 1923 aboard the Tomaso di Savoya. He had one battered suitcase and a few hundred dollars. He did odd jobs and in March, 1923, lying about his birthplace and his age, he applied for a job with a Buenos Aires telephone company switching from manual to automatic exchanges. Turks were looked down on, and so the "Greek" Aristo was born. Starting out as an "electrician", he trained as a night operator and was soon privy to much confidential information over the phone lines as he clandestinely listened in. Supplementing his $20 a week salary with odd jobs, he soon decided to go into the tobacco importing business. "He was particularly interested in the possibilities of selling oriental tobacco to local cigarette manufacturers." (1) He patched things up with his father and had him send samples of delicate Greek Napflion tobacco, which he went around passing out to the local manufacturers. He heard nothing in response. He targeted Juan Gaona, managing director of one of the biggest tobacco firms, and for 14 days stood outside his office, looking "reproachful and forlorn" until, annoyed Gaona asked his secretary who the hell this kid was. "A little Greek boy," she said. He asked Aristo inside and was relieved to find he just wanted to sell him tobacco, and sent him to the buying office. Dropping Gaona's name, Aristo picked up a $10,000 order, for which he got a 5% commission - $500. It was, Onassis later said, the foundation of his fortune. The next order was for $50,000. Word got around and he started getting orders from other companies, and a personal relationship developed with Gaona, who gave him private business advice. One day delivery men pulled up to the Gaona home with an expensive Persian rug, compliments of Aristo. Was Aristo's "oriental tobacco" an opium blend? Was it a code word for something more? Was Gaona the man whose "business advice" steered Aristo into a more profitable opium import business which would later expand to America? These questions can't be answered with any certainty, but the possibilities are rich. Remember - opium was legal. It wasn't like running heroin, opium or cocaine today. It would have certainly fit Aristo's "profile", his propensity for daring and his eye to profit. There would have been no reason for him not to - and every reason he should. If indeed Onassis did get into the Argentina opium trade, he most likely did so in 1924-25 and Gaona would have most likely been his contact and mentor. It would have been in May 1925 after he quit the phone company, saying he was happy with his work, but "I have an idea", that he went into the business full-time, with a $50,000 bankroll. Not bad for 18 months - from "a few hundred dollars" to $50,000 (half of it his, half of it borrowed). We do know that Ari was not above some "sordid action" - his own words - in which a man would go into a tobacco store, buy a pack of cigarettes, inject with a foul-tasting drug, then return it, saying he had mistakenly bought the wrong brand. The injection hole was nearly invisible and the pack would be put back on the shelf for the next customer, who would buy it, smoke one and gag. It was a good way to destroy the competition, and at this point Ari was manufacturing his own "oriental tobacco cigarettes" called Bis. It just happened to be a counterfeit version of Argentina's best-selling brand name. A lawsuit forced him to stop. He would also have the tobacco bales sprayed with salt water in Genoa, where they were transshipped, then file an insurance claim, adding to his profits, often in collusion with crooked insurance agents whom he paid to inflate the value of his "damaged" shipments. One of the Onassis agents was arrested and sent to prison for this. (1) In the late 1920s, Onassis met Costa Gratsos, who had a shipping background and would become his closest companion and confidant for the rest of his life. It would most likely have been Gratsos who steered young Ari into the shipping business and, perhaps indirectly, into the large-scale opium and alcohol shipments on the tankers Onassis would soon own. Onassis sold his tobacco company after the Greek government, in the summer of 1929, imposed a 1000% tariff on countries which did not have trade agreements with Greece. Argentina was one of those and Ari saw what a narrow profit base tobacco was. He returned to Greece for the first time in six years and met with the Greek minister of foreign affairs, successfully arguing for an Argentina exemption to the tariff increase. When he returned to Argentina, he was determined to do more than just sell tobacco; he was determined to go into shipping - where the real money was. In 1932, at the time of the alleged deal with the American mafia, and with $600,000 in assets, Onassis - only 26 - had expanded his imports beyond oriental tobacco (he was still importing, though not manufacturing) and was appointed Greek deputy consul in Buenos Aires, a position that would have certainly given him access to the Nazi-leaning mafioso who frequented Buenos Aires. In the fall of 1932, he took his $600,000 to London to become the famous shipping magnate in an industry rife with fraud. The Depression meant that ships were selling for less than their salvage value, even though they still had half their productive lives ahead of them. Ships were unbelievably cheap; you could pick one up for $20,000 - that had cost $1 million new - in 1930 dollars. His first fleet came from the Canadian National Steamship Company, selling 14 vessels -none of them more than 15 years old - for $30,000 each, less than salvage value. It's important to note that during Prohibition, Canada was the source of much of the bootlegging product shipped into America. He bought six - for $20,000 each, and paid cash. The ships sat in harbor throughout the winter, so it is highly unlikely Onassis was involved in any supposed smuggling until at least 1933 - at least from Canada. Yet, one former employer said that "In 1931, he [Onassis] was able to buy six freighters from Canada for $120,000, and put them to work as tramp or 'vagabond' steamers on non-commercial routes." (29:71) Just what might these 'vagabond' tramps been hauling - and for whom? Just when did they start hauling "non-commercial" freight? Immediately after their purchase or 18 months or more later? The source's information is incomplete and contradictory to that from other, more detailed sources, and this source is someone who for some unknown reason seems to have gone out of his way to spread some probably untrue rumors about his former employer. Christian Cafarakis, who claims to have been Onassis' "man Friday" for ten years, reveals something that is a bit surprising - and quite contradictory to nearly all of the Onassis biographies - and that is that Onassis was a shipper long before 1933. He claims Ari bought his first ship in 1921 at the age of 15!
When Cafarakis wrote this in 1972, Onassis was still alive. Had his French statement not been true, Onassis could have publicly refuted it. Cafarakis' account is quite flattering and supportive of the Onassis "rags to riches" tale, and he goes to great pains to assure he can personally vouch for the truthfulness of those he has quoted, a claim that seems a bit far-fetched. Is the Cafarkis account as fictional as Onassis' own self-history, with the story of a 15-year-old ship owner thrown in for spice and flavoring? Surely, not all of his accounts are correct, for he claims Onassis was already speaking fluent Spanish, English, Turk and Greek by the age of 15 - an account that conflicts with other stories of how Onassis struggled to learn Spanish much later after arriving in Argentina when we worked for the phone company. Cafarakis is quote hostile to Jackie, whom he considers selfish, spoiled, greedy and "the most difficult and demanding mistress they ever worked for." Well, as it turns out, Onassis was disgusted with Cafarakis' "shit." He was particularly angered that his former butler, who had left in 1968, had disclosed the "so-called" terms of the Onassis-Kennedy marriage pact. "Later, when a former steward on the Christina claimed that a secret marriage contract existed (stipulating separate bedrooms), her right notto have a child, and 168 other intimate clauses), he [Onassis] was bothered only that people might believe it and think that he had been 'suckered.' When Johnny Meyer offered to 'fix the mother' who had started the story (a Greek named Christian Cafarakis was the primary source of information on it, although he had quit the Christina some years before in 1968 - 'thanks to an inheritance which I wasn't expecting, I suddenly found myself in possession of a fortune'), Ari thought about it a minute, then told him to forget it. 'Anyone who believes that garbage can go fuck themselves.'" (10:224-25) There are two interesting things in Evans' account - Cafarakis' sudden fortune and Johnny Meyer. Was Cafarakis paid off to do a disinformation job that, while seeming to be pro-Onassis in so many ways, was actually a hatchet job designed to take a stab at his manhood? If so, his handlers knew where to hit that would cause the greatest pain. Greek men are very sensitive about their sexuality - and Onassis more so than most. And what about Johnny Meyer? Meyer provides the very first link between Onassis and Howard Hughes and the CIA, a link no one, not even Roberts himself, ever made. Meyers was the guy who made sure Uncle Sam didn't forget Hughes Aircraft when it came time to hand out the big fat defense contracts. The CIA-Hughes-Onassis becomes all the more intriguing when you consider that Onassis himself may well have been a spy in Argentina. For that story, we have to go back a year before Roberts' Gemstone Key. Ari
hated talking on the phone in conversations that went through
operators because they were listening. (10:59) This was most likely
a holdover from his days with the Argentine phone company when he
himself was listening in on conversations to pick up tips he would
later turn to money. It's also possible he was playing a role even
then as an intelligence asset - but for whom? The Greeks? The
Argentine government? The Argentine Mafia? He had ties to all three.
The US Office of Naval Intelligence described the scam a decade later in a confidential memo to the FBI in January 1943:
US Army Intelligence and Security Command also closely monitored his activities and reported directly to “Lt. Col. J. Edgar Hoover.” (10:48-49) This memo popped up again, years later, in 1942, when Onassis had moved to California and was hobnobbing with the Mafia and banging Joe Kennedy's mistress, Gloria Swanson. The following information is not strictly related in to the events of 1932, and is dealt with in greater detail later in this manuscript. It does not appear in the original Gemstones, but perhaps it should have: Dec.
7, 1941 – Ari was nearly 42 and depressed. He was bored with
Inge and wanted her permission to “see other people.” His next
conquest was sugar heiress Geraldine Spreckles, a starlet with a
Warner Brothers contract and a habit for burning through men’s
money. Her father had been killed in a car wreck and her mother had
married a Turk. Geraldine spoke flawless Turk, having lived in
Constantinople. Before getting her inheritance when she was 20 they
had been poor; her mother hadn’t gotten a penny her father’s
wealth. They fascinated each other, but at 22 she soon headed for
Hollywood. Ari
applied for a re-entry visa, saying he had been born in Salonika,
Greece on Sept. 21, 1900. He claimed he was Argentinan and still had
his Argentina passport to back him up. May
8, 1942 – He closed down his tobacco business and in June
headed to California “to concentrate on my shipping interests and
be close to my friends.” Two of his new tankers (bought from Gulf
Oil) were there – Calirrhoe and Gulf Queen. Costa
Gratsos had been named Greek maritime consul in San Francisco.
Spyros Skoura was president of 20th Century-Fox and
chairman of the Greek War Relief Fund. Otto Preminger, Gloria
Swanson (Ari’s lover and also that of Joseph Kennedy), Ludwig
Bemelmans, Alberto Dodero, former British diplomat Sir Charles Mendl
and his wife (an American ex-actress), Elsie de Wolfe, and many more
of his drinking buddies were in California. He left Inge behind and
moved into the Beverly Hills Hotel – Howard Hughes’ base. He
kept pestering Geraldine Spreckles, who had gone to California to
get away from him, and she kept telling him to leave her alone. She
didn’t want some froggy-looking old Greek, she wanted a clean-cut
American boy. Ari got her “clean cut American boy” drunk and
brought him to her doorstep and dumped him. “Here’s your
clean-cut all-American boy!” he shouted in a rage. Ari’s friend,
Gratsos, was appalled. Ari
dated Veronica Lake, Paulette Goddard, Simone Simon, Gloria Swanson
– a slew of beauties. July
16, 1942 – The day Ari heads back to NY to tell Inge he’s
marrying Geraldine, whom he had worn down, J. Edgar Hoover writes a
confidential letter to Adm. Emory S. Land, head of the War Shipping
Administration, repeating rumors that Ari was a Nazi. (83: 10) Ari
believed Stavros Niarchos had been behind it. Inge didn’t like
Niarchos and had warned Ari, “Watch his eyes! Watch his eyes!” Ari
gave Inge the kiss off and left behnd a check for $200,000 and a
short affectionate note. He was back to Hollywood. Nov.
13, 1942 – The US Embassy in Buenos Aires sent a special
dispatch to Washington reporting they had “information that
Onassis possessed fascist ideas and was considered shrewd and
unscrupulous.” An FBI espionage case was started against him by
the LA Field Division. Ari’s closeness to Fritz Mandl (US
intelligence could never figure out how he had gotten his huge
fortune out of Austria in 1938) and his wife, had put the spotlight
on him. Otto Preminger said some of the Mandl group were
“out-and-out Nazis” and even “Nazi agents.” Spyros Skouras
had asked Ari to donate to the Greek War Relief Fund and Ari had
refused, saying “I’ve seen what happens to men who get involved
in political causes.” Skouras angrily denounced him: “You’re
just another jumped-up shit from Smyrna.” (10:83-84)
Ari recalled, “I think they must have been FBI, but I never got a look at them, so I don’t know. But they claimed that I was a shyster and a Fascist. The Fascist shit was mostly innuendo, making a lot out of my friendships with Mandl and some people in Buenos Aires. They covered a lot of ground. They were certainly thorough. There was even stuff in there about insurance claims that went back years and which they said weren’t on the up and up.” Sasha
had been educated at the Imperial Naval Academy and the Military
School in Russia. Maj. Alexander P. de Seversky (his real name) had
lost his right leg when he was shot down in a dogfight over the Gulf
of Riga in WW I. Sent to Washington as a naval attaché, he decided
to remain in the US after the Russian Revolution. He designed the
P-35 fighter in 1935, prototype of the P-47 Thunderbolt, and later
worked on the first automatic synchronous bombsight. A few
days later, Gratsos confirmed the FBI surveillance. Gratsos had
connections, for he was running the 15 Greek Liberty Ships,
prefabricated by the US to reinforce the North Atlantic convoys. Ari
contacted Johnny Meyer, who worked for Howard Hughes. Meyer was a
man with dangerous secrets and covert connections. (10:86). Meyer
looked like a well-groomed gangster, and had worked for many famous
people. Ari had met him through Sasha, who told him, “Meyer knows
everybody, and has [expense account] receipts to prove it!”
Meyer’s main business was to make sure Uncle Sam didn’t forget
Hughes Aircraft when it was handing out contracts. “I don’t know
where all the bodies are buried,” Meyer told him, “but I do know
where most of them are sleeping – and that’s even better.” Ari
wanted him to find out who was behind the surveillance, and why. A
few weeks later Meyer reported back. Skouras had been in Washington
talking to the State Department and had said some nasty things about
Onassis. Also, Meyer had heard somebody in the Greek embassy had
sent the FBI some hostile reports. Onassis knew who that would have
been – Stavros Niarchos, who had joined the Greek navy and was
assistant to the naval attaché in the Greek embassy. The Plot to Kidnap the Kennedy Children Interestingly, Cafarakis is also the source of another interesting revelation in a second book, The Fabulous Jackie, in which he recounts the story of a threat made against Jackie Kennedy after the assassination: "First of all, thanks to Jackie Kennedy Onassis' butler in Athens, Greece, Christain Cafarakis, we know why Jackie did nothing after her husband's death. In a book published in 1972, Cafarakis tells about an investigation Jackie had conducted by a famous New York City detective agency into the assassination of JFK in 1964 and 1965. It was financed by Aristotle Onassis and resulted in a report in the spring of 1965 telling who the four gunmen were and who was behind them. Jackie planned to give the report to LBJ but was stopped by a threat from the assassins to kill her and her children. Ted, Bobby and other family members knew about the report and the threat." (6)
"Jackie's thoughts immediately turned to an incident the day of her wedding to Onassis - a plot to kidnap her two children, narrowly averted when Greek police discovered and foiled the plot," Moore says.
Moore said the Kennedy children were the target of a very sophisticated commando raid planned for early the morning of the wedding. "They had a high-speed motorboat equipped with mounted machine guns and two rocket launchers, not to mention an arsenal of smaller weapons. There were several other people involved, less directly, according to my Greek secret service sources."
The "official" story was that the kidnappers were part of a separatist guerilla force opposed to the military rule set up in Greece after the army overthrew the government there. Thousands of members of this underground "terrorist" group are said to be locked away in government concentration camps. "Their plan was to use the children as leverage to get Onassis to use his influence to win the release of the imprisoned nationalists. Failing that, they felt they were sure to get a king's ransom for the children's lives."
The plot originated in Candia, a hot bed of anti-government activity on the island of Crete, and was uncovered by a paid informant. Police quickly found the group's headquarters, based on the informant's information. It was in an isolated part of the island, in a fishing cabin. The speedboat was hidden in a cove, all fueled, loaded and ready to go. The operation was stopped only four or five hours before the boat would have left, Moore says. "The commando group was dressed and ready to board. Their craft was faster than the police boat and had they made it onboard they probably could have outrun their pursuers. Moore says a Greek security source said, "The place [Skorpios] was terribly under-protected." Jackie never knew about the plot until well after the wedding. After reading the detective's report on JFK's assassination, she grew increasingly suspicious about Onassis' involvement in the wedding day plot, thinking perhaps he might have done it to win sympathy from an American public that was dismayed she had married him. Friends of Onassis say such a thought "is insane." Could Cafarkis, supposedly loyal to Onassis, have been the one who had told him of the Kennedy meeting and the infamous report? Certainly he had the opportunity, with his unfettered access to the yacht, and he seems to have been the only one - publicly at least - who knew about the report and the later threat. It was shortly after this incident that the fabled Ari-Jackie marriage began to fall apart. As early as 1900, the patent medicine business, based on opium, was a $59,611,355 a year business. (2) Sixteen years later, when the Harrison Act was passed, America had become a nation of addicts. In 1921 the law was strengthened to cut down on physicians' prescriptions for opiates and the legal market for opium began drying up. But the addicts still needed their fix. Enter Arnold Rothstein, Charles "Lucky" Luciano, Meyer Lansky and Waxey Gordon.
There are two "mafias" - the mafia and the Mafia. The first was a legitimate protective mechanism for abused Italians and Sicilians in America; the second is what we now call organized crime, and grew out of the first. The old-line Mafia was bitterly dead set against dealing drugs, but it was Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky who introduced the new and highly-profitable drug trafficking into the United States, well-organized and well-controlled. "Meyer [Lansky] steered himself scrupulously clear of Charlie's ["Lucky" Luciano's] involvement in prostitution and drugs. They lay on the other side of a barrier he would not cross. "I haven't ever dealt in narcotics," he told New York newspaper editor Paul Sann in 1975, with a mixture of pride and distaste. "I dislike people dealing in it." (11) This account is bolstered by others, and would seem to discredit Roberts' claim that Lansky was involved in a heroin deal with Onassis, Kennedy and Meyer - or anyone else. Those who recount Lansky's opposition to drugs, in addition to Lansky himself, don't hesitate to admit the Mafia itself was selling drugs - and mention plenty of names -- just that Lansky was personally opposed and wanted no part of it. Luciano says he was also opposed, but during a meeting at which his authority as godfather was formalized, he realized he couldn't get himself recognized as top dog and at the same time put a stop to the drug dealing, so he backed off on that issue. Is Luciano rewriting history to make himself look better? Is Lansky lying about his own opposition? The evidence from all the available sources indicate Lansky was probably telling the truth, and there's maybe a 50-50 chance Luciano was truthful. If you want to know who definitely was running the heroin pipeline, turn to Arnold Rothstein, Waxey Gordon and the Bronfman (Seagram) Brothers. Rothstein was running whiskey from Canada through the Bronfman Brothers (Seagrams Distillers) and by 1925 was up to his neck in heroin smuggling as well, lured by Gordon's promise of "money, big money". Luciano had been a small-time dope runner since he was a kid. The story of these two men is far too long and complex to tell here, and is widely documented in books such as Luciano's The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano. Gordon wanted to do it, but didn't have the money. Rothstein had the money and had hundreds of thousands of dollars invested in a worldwide heroin network. In 1923, a kilo of heroin (2.2 lbs.) could be bought for $2,000 - and resold for more than $300,000! Rothstein was beginning to edge out of the rum-running and he saw heroin as the perfect, and much more profitable, replacement. Meyer Lansky, the "little Jew", was the moneyman, the brains that made the Mafia profitable on a nationwide scale. Luciano was the grand capo, the ultimate godfather in charge of the assorted Mafia families after inter-family wars led to a truce and the formation of "the Commission" or La Cosa Nostra (strictly a Hoover phrase). Rothstein sold in lots so big no one else could enter the market and compete against him, and the risks were minimal. The Boston connection - and thus the Kennedy connection - was "King" Solomon. In Chicago it was the Joe Torrio-Al Capone mob. In Philadelphia "Nig" Rosen, and in New York there were several families buying from Rothstein. Harry Mather was Rothstein's first buyer - buying for Rothstein in huge quantities, later joined by Dapper Dan Collins in Europe, then in 1926 Jacob ("Yasha") Katzenberg. Bootleg liquor and heroin became one and the same, transported on the same ships from the same sources to the same buyers at the same time. Journalist Nat Ferber wrote that "Rothstein established himself as the financial clearing house for the foreign dope traffic. ... He was the only man in the United States who could, and did, establish a credit standing with foreign interests sending drugs into this country." Among the participating bankers was Phil Kastel (Dillon and Company) with $300,000 in heroin transactions. Until 1925, Rothstein had imported strictly from European sources, but that year he sent Sid Stajer, himself an addict, to China, Formosa and Hong Kong, making buys in all three places. The following year he sent George Uffner to Asia. At home, in New York, Rothstein set up Rothstein, Inc., an investment firm, and bought Valentine's, a well-known and - until then- reputable importing business known for its imported oriental antiques. Oriental tobacco. Oriental antiques. Both a cover for the hidden oriental import - heroin. The late 1920s are littered with the arrests of Rothstein agents on drug charges, including Boston chieftain "King" Solomon.. At the time of his death, Rothstein himself had over $2 million tied up in his heroin business - an awful lot of money in 1928. When he was shot and killed, federal agents stumbled onto documents that led them to tens of millions of dollars in heroin seizures, and they only barely scratched the surface. (2) "Leptke" Buchalter and Luciano stepped in to take over, and the federal investigations accomplished little except to trigger a "holiday" for a few months that simply drove the street price of heroin up, creating more profit than ever. Katzenberg remained the principle European buyer and a thug named "Curly" Holz was assigned as "roving buyer" - scouring the world for huge heroin buys. Nothing changed except the profits.
The Meyers were cousins to the Lazards. The Lazard brothers came to the U.S. from Alsace Lorraine, a part of France. They started a dry goods and clothing store and called it Lazard Freres in 1847. After they heard about the Gold Rush, their store burned down and so they came out to San Francisco for a new beginning and again opened a dry goods and clothing store in 1849. Now having made a great deal of money in their business, they decided to close down their business and try to make even more money by opening up a bank which became one of the largest banks in the West called the London, Paris and American bank. In 1883, cousin Eugene Meyer was asked to run the San Francisco office while the Lazards set up headquarters in New York and branches in New Orleans, London and Paris. Meyer's other son, Edgar, was lost on the Titanic. His two daughters married Sigmund and Abraham Stern, who ran Levi Strauss & Co. Eugene Meyer, Jr. became a Wall Street
wheeler-dealer and leading Jewish financier His daughter was
Katherine Graham. Meyer, who bought The Washington Post in
1933-just shortly after resigning as a governor of the Federal
Reserve System. Katharine Meyer married poor-boy-turned-Harvard
lawyer Philip Graham in 1940. There is much less evidence to connect Meyer to any such "heroin deal" than the others. Meyer did, however, have a somewhat shady history and it was on his watch at the War Finance Corp. that hundreds of millions of dollars of federal funds simply vanished into thin air just after World War I and before World War II, and were never accounted for. His "explanations" to a Congressional committee were deemed inadequate, but Roosevelt held virtual dictatorship over America in those years, and nothing ever came of it. It would have been natural for him to have private links to the Mafia elements seeking to circumvent war rations and stockpile materials for their own black market schemes. A financier, he ran in the same circles as Kennedy, Roosevelt's Ambassador to France, and most likely would have at least rubbed elbows with the likes of Arnold Rothstein and Company. He was accused of stock market improprieties, but was never indicted or convicted of anything, and lived his life as "an exemplary American citizen." But then, so did Kennedy, who also had never been charged, indicted or convicted. He held considerable power at the Reconstruction Finance Corp. (1931), and it was the springboard for his later private success and wealth. In the interests of fairness, I have to (again) stress that some of these activities may have been legal at the time. Stock market manipulation was commonplace and, like gambling, it wasn't illegal until it got so far out of hand that laws had to be passed to curtail it. Though legal, these activities may not have been wanted in any biographies and so were "cleaned up." In his early career (but not in 1932), heroin was legal. He may have shared the beliefs of his contemporaries that, even though laws had been passed against alcohol, they were "ridiculous laws" and should be ignored. That was, after all, the consensus of most Americans, and the reason Prohibition was repealed. See the Eugene Meyer file for more details about the man and his career.
Joseph Kennedy was involved up to his neck in the Boston bootlegging after Prohibition (the Volstead Act) was passed January 29, 1919, according to several sources, including Luciano, whose memoirs weren't published until after his death. Kennedy's bootlegging dates back to at least 1924, according to the accounts of Sam Giancana, Jr. and Chuck Giancana, his uncle. Chuck Giancana was practically raised by his uncle, the notorious Sam "Moody" Giancana, Chicago's cold-blooded assassin and later Mafia chieftain. Other accounts take his bootlegging back to at least 1922, and still others back to 1920. "Joe ordered liquor from overseas distillers and supplied it to organized crime syndicates that picked up the liquor on the shore. Frank Costello would later say that Joe approached him for help in smuggling liquor. Joe would have the liquor dumped at a so-called Rum Row - a transshipment point where police were paid to look the other way - and Costello would then take over. Costello was allied with men like Meyer Lansky, Joe Adonis, Louis 'Lepke' Buchalter, Abner 'Longy' Zwillman, Dutch Schultz, and Charles 'Lucky' Luciano. They distributed the liquor, fixed the prices, established quoteas, and paid off the law enforcement and politicians. They enforced their own law with machine guns ..." (11:33-34) "The way he [Costello] talked about him [Joe]," recalled columnist John Miller, "you had the sense that they were close during Prohibition, and then something happened. Frank said that he helped Kennedy become wealthy." Just ten days before he died, Costello told Peter Maas the same story when the two were collaborating on a book about Costello's life. "Frank said he [Joe] was in the liquor business," Maas said. "It was illegal at the time ... It was during Prohibition." Joseph "Joe Bananas" Bonanno also confirmed that Joe's people unloaded whisky during Prohibition at Sag Harbor in Long Island, New York. On May 1, 1983, he repeated his statement to Mike Wallace on CBS' 60 Minutes. A major Boston liquor distributor said Joe promised a Chicago buddy that if he could get Al Capone's business, he would give him a 25% cut. The man got the business, but then Joe fired him and hounded him so he couldn't find another job. (11:34) It was a double-cross tactic Joe would play again and again and which eventually lead directly to the events of November 22, 1963. Joe was also buying rum from Jacob M. Kaplan in addition to the Scotch he was getting through Costello. [Kaplan in 1945 became owner of Welch's Grape Juice Company.] Kaplan, from Massachusetts, made molasses and rum in Cuba and the West Indies. The Scotch came in from Saint-Pierre and Miquelon at $45 a case. These were two small groups of about eight islands in the North Atlantic about 16 miles south of Newfoundland, under the French flag, which meant no high Canadian import taxes. Shipping costs added $10 a case, while overhead, labor and bribes cost another $10, bringing Kennedy's cost to $65 a case or $325,000 for the typical 5,000-case shipment. It was diluted by 50%, then repacked and sold to wholesalers for $85 a case, bringiing a profit of $525,000 on a $325,000 investment. (11:34-35)
Before the 1922 Boston political campaign of his father-in-law, [Joseph] Kennedy slipped away for a few days to attend his tenth Harvard reunion at the Pilgrim Hotel in Plymouth. "Joe loved fun," said a classmate [Ralph Lowell]. "He was a leader at the reunions." The theater operator entertained the gathering by showing the newly released films of the Jack Dempsey-Jess Willard and Dempsey-George Carpenter heavyweight bouts. He also saw that Prohibition didn't put a damper on the party. "Joe was our chief bootlegger," said another Harvard '12. "Of course, he didn't touch a drop himself, but he arranged with his agents to have the stuff sent in right on the beach at Plymouth. It came ashore the way the Pilgrims did." These comments came from Arthur J. Goldsmith, Kennedy classmate, in a Dec. 26, 1992 interview in New York, and from Raymond S. Wilkins in an April 12, 1963 interview in Boston. (4) According to Fortune magazine, Joe Kennedy's wealth in mid-1922 was $2 million (equal to $15 million in 1996). Where did he get it? Since leaving Hayden, Stone in 1922, he never had a visible means of support. (12:35) It would seem only bootlegging and possibly drug trafficking could have accounted for such a huge increase in wealth. When Rose saw the story in the paper, she asked if they were really as wealthy as the papers claimed, and if so, why hadn't he told her? "How could I tell you, when I didn't know myself?" he said. "My husband changed jobs so frequently, I simply never knew what business he was in," she later recalled. "It was mostly developing some movies and then, of course, there was the embassy in London and some jobs with the New Deal in Washington." "According to [Diamond Joe] Esposito, in the early fall of 1924, when asked once again by [President Calvin] Coolidge how he could be paid for his recent political assistance, he requested a promise that the President not interfere with a Chicago takeover of all union operations - coast to coast. Under the guise of generosity, he also asked that the men he supplied with sugar - Joe Kennedy in Boston, Sam and Henry Bronfman of Canada, Lewis Rosentiel of Cincinnati, and Joe Reinfeld of New Jersey - receive special protection and all rights to bootlegging." (3) In 1925, Joe expanded his business when Columbia Trust Company, now headed by his father, bought Quincy Cold Storage Warehouse, which had supplies of liquor still left over from before Prohibition. Kennedy himself, in 1938, implicitly confirmed he was a bootlegger when he bragged as ambassador to London that he knew all about trade with the British: "On and off for 20 years I have more or less successfully traded with the British," he wrote to the State Department in October 1938. He had no other foreign trade during that time, so he could only have been referring to his bootlegging, first during Prohibition, then after 1930 as a legitimate distributor. His ties to the mob, or Outfit, continued right up until after his son became president. By 1934, "the Chicago gang became more daring and ambitious in its tactics and [Paul] Ricca, [Frank] Nitti, and [Murray] Humphreys, who claimed to have gotten a foothold in Hollywood by financially backing fellow bootlegger Joe Kennedy's successful entry into the motion picture industry, decided to take their union rackets nationwide by placing a local man, George Browne, along with Willie Bioff, in power as president of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Motion Picture Operators." According to the Giancana account, some of the mob-sponsored stars of the time included the Marx Brothers, George Raft, Jimmy Durante, Marie McDonald, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Jean Harlow, Cary Grant and Wendy Barrie, who received extravagant contracts, from which the mob got their kickbacks. (3:101) Although this event took place in the 1920s, no date has been provided, but Kennedy had made the mistake of running his bootlegged rum (perhaps heroin as well?) through the Detroit area without proper permission from the Purple Gang, and they had put out a contract on him. Hat in hand, Kennedy went to Chicago to beg Esposito to intervene on his behalf. Mooney had watched Esposito, Ricca and Humphreys "toy capriciously with the man's fate." Esposito had finally put in the requested phone call, and ever after, Kennedy was in Chicago's debt. (3: 104) Historians are in general agreement that Kennedy's fortune was indeed made, in large part, by his bootlegging, though the Kennedy family vehemently denied it. His manipulation of the stock market certainly showed he was inclined to "do whatever it takes" to make money. Kennedy was constantly worried about money; it was clearly more important to him than family. "He had money and knew how to make it, and money was uppermost in his mind," writes Richard Whalen in The Founding Father: The Story of Joseph Kennedy. He had vowed to make a million dollars by his 35th birthday, according to an article "Mr. Kennedy, the Chairman" in Fortune, Sept. 1937. After Prohibition ended, the Mafia moved in to control the newly-legal liquor industry, buying up legal distributorships, then pouring their own bootleg into the properly-labeled bottles and making an extra killing on the profits. Kennedy was right in the middle of it, and used James ("Jimmy") Roosevelt, son of President Franklin Roosevelt, to get his cut. In September 1933, Joe and Rose Kennedy took a cruise to Europe with Jimmy and Betsey Roosevelt, combining profit and pleasure. Kennedy wanted to be in on the post-Prohibition liquor boom. Representatives of British distillers were lining up American distributors and Joe Kennedy wanted to be one of them. The competition was cutthroat, because these distributorships were little more than a license to become rich, Whalen writes.
It's inconceivable that Kennedy, who badly coveted a prestigious post in the Roosevelt administration, would have screwed over the President's son. Both Jimmy (who was later accused of stock frauds and even a Bahamas assassination plot) and his brother Elliott Roosevelt, were well-known for their shady operations, trading off their family name to gain access other people couldn't get. (see sidebar for individual background information). During Prohibition, alcohol and heroin were shipped across from Canada via the Bronfmans (Seagram's Distillers) and Arnold Rothstein's organizations, offloaded at the Boston docks by Boston police, and sent on its way to Kennedy warehouses. As pointed out in earlier documentation, the alcohol and heroin shipments were mingled together as part of a combined operation. As with Onassis, one needs to look at the "proclivity" of the alleged criminal to determine just how likely he would be to commit the acts attributed to him. While there's no "smoking gun" to show that Kennedy or the Roosevelts, for that matter, "directly" participated, there is every bit of evidence to show they were probably involved and profited directly. Joe Kennedy and the Roosevelts (a) were too important to be actually touching the goods themselves, and (b) due to their positions of power and officialdom, had to create a protective barrier between themselves and their nefarious activities to create a blanket of "plausible deniability." That's what you have lower-level operatives for; you don't personally get dirt on your hands when you have that kind of political and social status. Kennedy had almost an obsession with secrecy; his own wife, Rose, confessed she didn't know what he did for a living. His reputation as "a loner" and his power in later years to intimidate inquiring writers and wipe the dirtier marks from his "official" records certainly helped clean up his historical image. His loner reputation did not set well with his Mafia friends, who clung to the "culture of family." He was never trusted and although dealt with, it was done at arm's length. The best and most detailed accounts of Kennedy's involvement with bootlegging and with the Mafia come from Laurence Leamer's The Kennedy Men: 1901-1963. I hesitate to use such a long excerpt from someone else's book, in that I try to keep it short and within the Fair Use copyright guidelines. This section, however, is critically important from an historic viewpoint, and so I present it:
FDR, Kennedy, the Drug Connection - and Harvard The drug links between both Roosevelt and Kennedy are better uncovered in examining the Harvard connection, in which the venerable university is largely funded by drug smuggling money, according to authors like Catherine Austin Fitts (former Assistant Secretary for Housing who was in a position to know these things firsthand), Linda Minor and Uri Dowbenko, among others. These same ties later extend to Harken Energy, the oil company of President George W. Bush and Zapata Oil, his father's firm. There is far more in common than a good Harvard education, and those links go back in time and they go deep. This is one of those deep links among the American Blue Bloods that goes back to the American Revolution and has extended up through the tenure of Pug Winokur, on the board of Harvard Endowments. For a much deeper accounting than there is room for here, you might want to go to www.newsmakingnews.com/1mharvardpart1.htm on the Internet. This is a story that continues right up to the current Enron scandal. According to these accounts, a group called the "Essex Junto" was set up to control the destiny of Harvard just after the Revolution. The university was entirely under the control of a group of men from Essex County, Massachussets, just north of Boston. Correspondence in 1808 between then-Senator John Quincy Adams and Thomas Jefferson accused these men of being part of a plot to secede from the Union because they felt the country's nationalistic policies were detrimental to their own business self-interests:
All but Reeve had been born in Essex County. Judge Parsons was described by one of his faculty members this way: "Our college ... is under the absolute direction of the Essex Junto, at the head of which stands Chief Justice Parsons, ... a man as cunning as Lucifer and about half as good. This man is at the head of the Corporation." ("Theophilus Parsons" in Dictionary of American Biography, quoted by Zechariah Chafee, Jr.) The Cabot family, who with the Lowells pretty much controlled Harvard, was involved in shipping long before Aristotle Onassis was even born, establishing its fortunes in the war years of 1776-1783. Leon Harris, in Only to God: The Extraordinary Life of Godfrey Lowell Cabot, (New York: Atheneum, 1967-pg. 6) wrote that "The Cabots provided America with more privateers than any other family." Like so many other early shipping traders, they preferred the China market. After the British East India Company had imported so much opium into China that it was becoming a serious social problem, the Chinese tried to ban the import of the drug, and that led to the Opium Wars. Britain actually fought a war to force China to accept heroin. And the early American traders such as the Cabots had a huge financial stake in the success of that war, for their imports - to both America and China - depended heavily on opium products and West Indies slave trade, which were quite legal in America at the time. Many of the Boston blue bloods were directly involved. John Perkins Cushing represented the Cabot interests and by 1820 was known as the most influential foreigner in Canton, and was very close to the hong merchant Houqua, said to be the world's richest man at his death in 1843. During the War of 1812, the Boston (and other) money lenders had been charging 18% interest to Canton fur merchants, but the fur trade was slowing down and they turned to opium as a substitute. The first Perkins cargo of Turkish opium hit China in 1816 aboard the brigantine Monkey. It was the beginning on the road to fabulous wealth for Perkins and several other Boston money houses. Perkins welcomed the China crackdown because he knew it would eliminate his competition and leave the market his. He was right. John Jacob Astor and Stephen Giard dropped the opium trade, leaving only Perkins and the Boston firm of Bryant & Sturgis (William Sturgis was a Perkins nephew and employee) to share a monopoly on the Turkish opium imports to China. This "ancient history" is presented here (much briefer than it deserves to be) simply to establish that the heroin/opium trade was far more commonplace and accepted than the reader might think. First, it was legal, so the reader has to set aside the current legal bans and look at it in that less-alarming light. Second, heroin trade was done not by shadowy underworld thugs, but by the most respectable banks and traders of the time. The enormous profits were to be were plowed back into the druglords' US holdings and used to gain control of educational institutions, corporations, Wall Street, politics - virtually every aspect of American culture. When these dugs, like alcohol, were banned by some "do-gooder" politician, the blue bloods simply ignored it as an aberration of law and justice that did not apply to them. They had the connections to go on doing what they'd always done. It was the "do-gooders" who were in the wrong, not the blueblood druglords. That was their logic and the basis for continuing the drug/alcohol "import business" long after it became illegal. The reader should also understand that America was not founded as a democracy, but as a republic. This means that those who have the most wealth are the ones who must set the rules - because they have the most to lose. It's the Golden Rule: He who has the gold makes the rules. That is the "street definition" of a republic. Rather than be shocked at the thought of a heroin deal between a president and the Mafia, one needs to look at it in light of the country's republic structure and of the times. In that context, it becomes much more possible, even likely, that yes, such an arrangement did exist. In conclusion, there is no evidence of any heroin deal. Because Onassis didn't even start his shipping fleet until 1933, he couldn't very well have been shipping heroin on that non-existent fleet in 1932, despite his probable trade in the substance earlier in Argentina and, earlier, in Smyrna from the family "export" business.
Since Rockefeller and the Seven Sisters oil cartel play such an important role in Roberts' story, it is almost incomprehensible that he mentions not a word of Rockefeller's heroin connections, which can be verified much easier. Still, the sale of heroin in its various forms was, at the time, legal. But it sets a pattern of power and dominance, as well as brutality and murder, that the Rockefeller clan would follow for generations. If the Gemstones are to be regarded as "an alternative history" of America, the Rockefeller connection cannot be ignored. The paths of Joe Kennedy, Aristotle Onassis, the Roosevelts and the Mafia would cross paths many times and in many places - from the money-laundering banks and financiers to the government agencies that controlled shipping and rationing, to bootlegging and even into Hollywood, where they would also link with Howard Hughes. Individual timelines being prepared for Joseph Kennedy, James and Elliott Roosevelt, Aristotle Onassis, Charles Luciano, Sam Giancana, Frank Costello, the Rockefellers, Robert Maheu, Howard Hughes, Johnny Meyer and others put all these links in a broader perspective that was never available in Roberts' Gemstone Files. |
1931:
Nudged by Andreas Michalakopoulos, the Greek government appointed Aristotle
deputy consul. “It gave him not only status, which he craved, but
access to large sums of Western currency at basic exchange rates,
which he cashed in on the booming black market. Costa Gratsos
disapproved. “I thought it was a dangerous game which could
jeopardize his diplomatic benefits.” The game he was playing
was espionage, Aristo hinted.
The
above paragraph is taken from a self-published e-book by Richard
Sprague. In 1966, Mr. Sprague commenced an intensive program of
research into the photographic evidence associated with the
assassination of John Kennedy. He served a year as photographic
expert advisor in the investigations conducted by New Orleans
District Attorney Jim Garrison and had amassed and analyzed a
majority of the known evidence on film by 1968 when he co-founded
the Committee to Investigate Assassinations (CTIA). He served with
CTIA as an active researcher, board member and Secretary from 1968
to 1974.
In
Jim Moore's own investigation on behalf of Rep. Henry Gonzalez,
chairman of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, he
discovered that Jackie had asked Ted Kennedy and some other family
members to meet her on the Christina yacht while
Onassis was away on one of his trips. She had just received the
report and was frightened. Onassis had not yet seen the report and
would have been outraged to find it fingered him as the man behind
the Jack Kennedy assassination. She was shocked to find out the
brains behind the assassination were allegedly the very man she had
later married. She believed someone aboard the Christina had
somehow learned of the Kennedy pow-wow, after which she received the
threat. The report was taken by Onassis himself and never seen
again, said to have been locked away in his personal safe. Moore
also confirmed the threat against the Kennedy children, and detailed
an earlier plot on Mrs. Kennedy's wedding day, October 28, 1968..
"There
were several rubber dinghies aboard the motorboat for a silent night
landing. They also found dark clothes, tennis shoes, knives and
silencer-equipped pistols. A lot of precautions had been taken to
keep the press off the island, but Onassis had made no plans for
security against an event such as this, leaving some officials
wondering if Onassis hadn't been behind that, too."
Skorpios,
Onassis' private
Arnold
Rothstein
Sam
"Mooney" Giancana with his wife.
Joe
Kennedy with Edward "Eddie" Moore,