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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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Who
is Jim Moore?
He ended up in the Chicago West Side slums living in his car, parked illegally in a lot near a bus stop. He would spend the day looking for work, then come back to sleep in his car. He came back one afternoon from his job search and was promptly grabbed by Chicago's finest and thrown into the back of a squad car, then taken to Peoria where police said he was being charged with bank robbery. "It scared the crap out of me. I'd never robbed a bank in my life! It turned out to be mistaken identity, but I spent two weeks in a Peoria hellhole and the jailer made me give him what few things I had - a radio and a guitar, I think, in exchange for bus fare back to Chicago. They told me the sun had better not set on me in Peoria. And it never has since." "I realized Chicago was a rough city when I was walking toward downtown one morning and saw this old guy get his head bashed in with a brick over a quarter he didn't want to give up. The black guy doing the bashing turned and looked at me like I was next. Hell, I just kept walking." He ended up working at Mario's restaurant on Division Street downtown, one of the swankier Chicago eateries at the time, and was befriended by the manager, who helped him find a place to live. His car had been confiscated by Chicago police when he was arrested, so he was back on foot, but it was easy to get around Chicago. "Everyone at work whispered Mario's was a Mafia front used to launder drug money," he says. "I have no idea if it's true. The manager was Sicilian or Italian, but by itself that means nothing. I was treated well and with respect, but I wanted to get back into journalism, not wait tables." He worked briefly as a copy boy at the Chicago Sun-Times "where I actually bumped into Ann Landers one day. She's a lot older than she looked in her pictures, even back then in 1966." He grabbed an opportunity to work at a trade magazine for the service station industry in one of the northern suburbs and quickly found another job nearby working for National Features Syndicate, which published The National Insider and The Tattler tabloids on North Pulaski Road and owned by Bob and Frank Sorren(1). It was there that he was drawn back into the world of Cubans and the JFK murder. The Truth About Tabloids and Men In Black
He took his job seriously, leaving "the clowning around" to others, he says. The "Flower Power" generation was blooming, questions were being raised anew about Kennedy's assassination in major mainstream magazines, and an unknown New Orleans District Attorney named Jim Garrison was about to stand America on its head with the first indictment charging the CIA with the Dallas murder.
One of his articles dealt with Soviet missiles still being hidden in Cuba, even after the Bay of Pigs debacle and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, when all such missiles were supposed to have been removed. "I got my information directly from the CIA - through the Cuban Student Directorate," he says. He still has a 31-page file on the Cuban Student Directorate from those National Insider days, filled with aging, barely visible photocopies of the photos supplied by the CIA, detailing ongoing Russian missile activities inside Cuba. The captions are still readable and at least one was taken by a Jose Vivieros, and reads:
"A Lambda-75 shortly before launching. Note how the canopy on the afterdeck conceals the secret gun mounts which have been installed beneath the movable deck. The ladder-like affairs after and starboard are huge scaffolds. When the boats reach this stage of construction, the militia guard is doubled and no [Bay of Pigs] prisoners are permitted to work aboard. "A few minutes after Jose Vivieros snapped this picture, a Soviet team headed by Marshall Nicolai Krilov arrived on the inspection tour [of Cuban boatyards where slave labor was used to build Lambda 75 gunboats]. This photograph was taken at the Joaquin DIaz Cominches shipyard at Santiago de Cuba, Oriente." Another photo purports to show:
The photo was taken just over the shoulder of Dementiev, not five feet away, by Vivieros standing just behind him on deck - and close enough to have assassinated him. Many of the photos clearly state: "EXCLUSIVE TO THE NATIONAL INSIDER - FIRST PUBLICATION IN THE UNITED STATES ... PHOTO SMUGGLED OUT OF COMMUNIST CUBA BY THE CUBAN STUDENT DIRECTORATE." "To my knowledge," Moore says, "these photos were never published anywhere, and I probably have the only copies still in existence. The CIA was worried that publication might expose some of their agents who took the photos - such as Vivieros. And it would have. In some of the photos, the Cubans could have deduced exactly who it was with the hidden camera because of the closeness and the angle. I still supported these guys as patriots, not terrorists, and I hadn't yet learned about their connection to the JFK hit." Several of the CIA-Cuban exile photos were printed, though not from this particular batch. The CIA frequently used the tabloids both for disinformation and to let the Russians and Cubans know their games had been exposed, Moore says. The Mystery of the Sunken Submarines "I myself worked with several such sources directly, from several embassies, including the Israeli embassy, when there was a flurry of submarines that mysteriously went down for no apparent reason - starting with the Thresher in April 1963. All of the countries involved - I know there was at least the US, France and Israel - were concerned about a new ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) electromagnetic weapon that crippled the on-board electronics and caused the subs to sink. To my knowledge, I am the only reporter who ever wrote a story on that aspect (for Midnight), and I did it because I had personal knowledge of the ELF technology involved going back to the days I had designed Project OBSAT." "In Vietnam, a number of our planes went down the same way. All backup systems - all three of them - would go down the same time as the main systems. It was a very sophisticated directed energy beam weapon based on Tesla-Moray physics. As for how it works, you wouldn't believe me if I told you, so I won't. Moore insists that, despite the "conventional wisdom" and vehement claims to the contrary from researchers such as Stephanie Caruana, Bruce Roberts was passing out Gemstones long before 1969. "Bruce Roberts was one of our 'heretics' - attracted because of the type of stuff we were publishing, especially about the Kennedy assassination," Moore says. "But, no, we never published him, he never presented us anything in a publishable form. We were working with two guys from Garrison's office - and no, I don't remember their names nor do I any longer have their letters, so I can't prove what I'm telling you. You can either believe me or you can conclude I'm full of shit - your choice. Do some homework. We had blow-ups of the grassy knoll gunman and I even had a name to go with it - a name that popped up in the Garrison trial and later in Watergate. He was the guy Nixon asked to erase the tapes using an electromagnetic beam weapon. Gordon Novel. The physical similarities were downright uncanny!
"The lawyer who looked at my stuff for libel clearance was Elmer Gertz. Elmer had been one of Jack Ruby's team of lawyers. He told me that I'd better be careful because some things were better left alone - I could get hurt. To me, that was confirmation that Gertz himself probably had some information gleaned from Ruby that confirmed I was on the right trail. Gertz was very disturbed by both the picture and the conclusions, but he said the story was not libelous because the evidence I had backed it up. He just said I should be very, very careful about printing it - and he wasn't talking about the legal aspects." So, he says, those critics who say it is "impossible" that Bruce Roberts would have thought of contacting him "are whistling in the dark." Enter Bruce Roberts
"There were two reasons I do not have copies of those papers. First, the publisher, Bob Sorren, asked me if I thought it was worth copying that much. My response was I thought the guy was nuts, and the mad scribbles probably weren't worth wasting copy paper on, but Bob thought I ought to try to copy at least a few pages if they had anything concrete to say. Second, Roberts wouldn't let me make copies, only notes. So my own blunder was negated by his refusal anyway. "I've read that because Roberts was stone broke, he couldn't afford to go anywhere outside San Francisco, so I don't know. The guy had a whole box of original, written-in-ink and some-in-pencil pages he claimed he had written, and he had a pretty close resemblance to the Bruce Roberts in Gerald Carroll's book Project Seek. He was, of course, much older, thinner and had a darker look about him, not cheery like in the Carroll photo with Carmen Miranda. But then, I guess, he had a lot to be dark about. One thing puzzles me and that's his eyebrows. Martin Cannon claims he lost his eyebrows in a garage fire, but the guy I saw had bushy eyebrows. Now, I didn't ask him if they were fake and pasted on. I had no reason to, and I didn't know he'd been involved in makeup in Hollywood. I don't think we discussed a whole lot about his private life at all, except for what he had written. I was familiar with David Ferrie and his phony eyebrows and this guy looked nothing like that. "I thought he was nuts because of the rapid way he talked, his persistent in-your-face earnestness that seemed just a little too strained, and his insistence that what he had was so damned important I should drop everything else and devote my life to his cause like he had. At the time I was in the middle of a murder case, where a guy in Indiana named Randy K. Wilson was doing life for a murder I don't think he did. He was set up for it to cover up a homosexual punk who shot his own grandmother (who just happened to own the town's bank) because she wouldn't give him the money he was always demanding. This was happening right in Dan Quayle's backyard outside Huntington. The Quayle family newspaper was trying to crucify the guy." In retrospect, Moore says he wishes he had taken Roberts more seriously, especially after his experience with the Wilson murder. "Every con in prison claims he's innocent. I didn't expect Wilson to be any different. His story was just a little too far-fetched to be believable, but I had been asked to check it out. I figured it would be a quick job to prove Wilson was full of crap. I was wrong. It turned out his story was so crazy it had to be true - and it was! That case ate at me until the day I left the Insider. I mean, the cops found blood-stained clothes in Wilson's trunk after the murder. Does that sound like guilty or what? Wilson said he had stopped to help some car accident victims that day and got blood on his clothes. I tracked them down. They'd never been interviewed before, not even by the cops. They confirmed the story. The clothes had never been tested, but when they were, their blood matched that of the accident victims. The whole damned case went like that. I was obsessed with getting to the truth and frankly I found Roberts to be a pain in the ass I didn't have time for." The Wilson case turned into a statewide controversy when the Indiana governor Roger Branigan [Branigan, Roger D. (Roger Douglas), 1902-1975], according to an AP story at the time, called a press conference and banned Moore from interviewing Wilson at the prison, claiming Moore had illegally passed himself off as an attorney. The AP story was the first he heard of the news. "I had written letters on National Features Syndicate letterheads. They knew who I was. I always thought it odd, though, that they always let me into the interview room without ever checking my briefcase or the box I had that contained my tape recording equipment. I took the governor on and forced him to back down after I proved he was lying, or had been misinformed - to give him a graceful exit. I was reinstated with the same visiting privileges as before, except now they searched me." But he did read through many of the Roberts' papers, at Roberts' insistence while he sat watching over Moore's shoulder. "I kept the notes around for years. But it was odd. A week or two after Roberts visited, Bob came back and said there were some people from the district attorney's office up front who wanted to talk to me. There were two men and a woman. We went into a small room off the stairwell and reception area, and they started asking me questions about the Kennedy stuff, and then started asking me about Bob. They swore to me that Bob was really named Robert Sorrentino, not just Robert Sorren, as I knew him, and that I was working for a Mafia hoodlum and was about to get my butt in big trouble. They took no notes and I was so shook up I didn't ask for any ID. But I've always wondered who they really were and why they were really there. Robert had never given me any indication he was Mafia and I thought they were full of crap, but in the back of my mind I still wondered. "I left the Insider because they got a librarian, Jeannie something or other, for the first time, and insisted that all the reporters turn their papers and files over to her, so they would be on file for everyone's use. I refused to give up the originals, but I didn't mind if they made extra copies for the library. I said that it was my name on those stories, pseudonym or not, and it was going to be me who got sued, and if so, it was going to be me who could guarantee the safety of the evidence we might need to fight any lawsuit." Moore not only had good reason for his stand, but his premonition proved correct. The Insider was sued for $20 million by Johnny Carson and the documents they would have based their defense on had vanished. "This happened maybe six months or a year after I left in 1969, and they went out of business some years later," Moore says. He had pursued two stories in particular that raised the specter of a possible lawsuit, or worse. The first was an expose of a battery additive called VX-6 that claimed, in full-page ads not only in The Insider but in other tabloids that it could "rejuvenate" dead car batteries. "I tested it myself. It was a red liquid, watery-like, that came in a little clear plastic tube like toothpaste but smaller. It was a scam, It didn't do crap. But the testimonial letters were very impressive. I found out they'd been written on stolen letterhead from city governments, written by men who had died before they allegedly wrote the testimonials, on and on. It was a two-part series. After the first part, the company approached us and offered us an additional $10,000 worth of advertising. Bob dropped it in my lap and left the decision to me. That was his most admirable moment the whole time I'd known him. I knew I could easily put $10,000 in my boss' pocket with a simple 'yes.' I said 'no.' The company threatened to sue, and I told them to go ahead because I was getting ready to print the second part - about the forged testimonials - so they might as well wait because I was giving them something to really sue over. We never heard from them again and they folded up before the feds could get there." The second story involved the Mafia itself. It was, Moore says, a long-term surveillance project focused on a counterfeit watch operation operating out of car trunks and the sidewalk in front of Warshawsky's on South State Street. Warshawsky's is a well-known and as far as is known reputable auto parts company specializing in hard-to-find auto parts. "These guys were selling brand-name watches, like Hamilton and Longines-Wittnaur, but they were counterfeits. In some cases, the name 'Hamilton' read 'Hormelton' in tiny letters hard to discern. The president of Longines-Wittnaur wrote me confirming they were aware of the fraud, but couldn't track it down. I did their work for them, but for the story. They didn't pay me a dime. Grandpa's Little Girl "I had two sources of information - the first was the Chicago Police Department and the second was the Chicago Crime Commission. When we ran the license plates I'd photographed and the photos of the men involved, it turned out they'd been charged several times with things like robbing downtown furriers, loan sharking, number-running, and so on. Hell, one guy had a rap sheet a mile long and page after page of surveillance showing him deeply involved with Sam Gianncana's outfit - but they'd never been able to get a conviction that meant anything. "At the time, I had been assigned my own personal secretary, expense account, the whole works. I guess I was pretty hot stuff for a kid my age. Her name was Linda Morganelli and I was madly in love with her, but she was engaged - and I was married. She enjoyed going out with me on surveillance jobs; doing just the office work alone was a bore. Linda would go out with me on stakeouts and serve as my lookout when I had to get into some tight places. She loved the excitement and I loved the smell of her, of having her nearby. Beautiful little redhead, not 110 lbs. "She'd gone with me to find the place the top honcho lived. We found it, but it wasn't a good time of day to go inside. I told her we'd come back later. Later that evening, I went back by myself, and I'm glad I did. I walked into the lobby and was checking out the names on the mailboxes when these two goons materialized behind me and beat the living shit out of me. My face looked like raw hamburger. The watcher - me - had been watched - and caught. "Two days later I was well enough to come back to work, sore as hell, and Linda almost cried when she saw me. That night she took me over to her grandfather's and I found out for the first time that Linda's own family was heavily connected to the mob. Grandpa was like one of the capos. I won't call him a godfather 'cause I don't know what he was. He was a thin old guy who looked more like royalty, but he had eyes of ice - except when he looked at his granddaughter. He outfitted me with an untraceable .25 semi-automatic pistol that night, and said if I had any more trouble, give him the names of the guys involved and he'd take care of it. Very quiet, very reserved, and he said it so softly you knew he wasn't bragging. He was treated with the utmost respect by everyone around him and you just knew there was no way you wanted to piss Grandpa off. I never had to use the gun and it disappeared when my sister stole it one day to impress a boyfriend. The cops took it, asked me about it, and I said it was mine. End of story. Almost. A few months later, the Federal Trade Commission raided a Mafia warehouse in New Jersey and confiscated tens of thousands of watches as they were being re-manufactured. More than a dozen Mafia figures went to jail. You'll probably find that in some dusty FTC archives. I found out about it when I got a press release from them." Moore says he feared retaliation more from the watch scandal than the VX-6 story, and insisted on keeping his own files and photograph negatives in a safe place. "I don't remember exactly when it was I left, in 1969, but I know it was after Martin Luther King's assassination and after Bobby [Kennedy] got shot in 1968. The night the riots swept the nation, I came out of the Insider office to take the el [elevated transit system] home. It was about half a block or so away, way up in the air on this platform. I walked up there and sat waiting for the el as the sun was going down and it was getting dark. I could see smoke to the south of me in big black plumes, all over Chicago's West Side. While I was sitting there, this gang of young black punks ran down the street - right below me - shooting off guns at every window and car they saw. I sat there, scared half to death - a lone white man in the wrong place at the wrong time. I tried not to move, hoping I wouldn't be noticed. I thought I had it made when they were running off away from me. Then, all of a sudden this one kid turns around and looks up in the air, straight at me. We made direct eye contact for what seemed forever, and I thought, 'Oh, shit! This is it.' We stared at each other a moment, neither of us blinking, then he just turned around and ran off with the others. I was shaking so bad I couldn't even light a cigarette." (1) The National Insider, Inc. v. Chicago Transit Authority. (ND Ill., E. Div., #64 C 33) Jan. 8, 1964: Pls.-publisher and distributor of newspaper, sued to enjoin Def. from ordering news dealers to withhold Pls'. publication from newsstands in def's. bldgs., and for $600,000 general and punitive damages. Case settled: Def. agreed to permit sale of Pls'. publication; dismissed by stipulation. (2) I first read Kerry's book in June of 1965. I, too was offended by it. I had just been put in touch with California critics of the Warren Commission who had convinced me that the official assassination story was false. And, just then, I read Kerry's book,, or rather, a series of articles run in "The National Insider" with very grotesque headlines implying Oswald was some type of psychotic idiot who had lurked in the woodwork, to come out on November 22 and assassinate the President. To read a book at the time which accepted Oswald's guilt aroused me enough to attempt to find the author and discuss the matter. It turned out that Kerry lived nearby, and I visited him. http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/lifton1.htm (3) 1964 - Jayne Mansfield resides with her family in a 52 East 69th Street, New York City townhouse and has a regular column in the National Insider. (4)"If you join the Church of Satan, you will be judged on your individual merits & abilities & nothing else," LaVey advised a homosexual who queried him via his "Letters To The Devil" column which appeared in National Insider. The homosexual asked if his particular sexual preference would help him to become a better Satanist. "What you do so far as your sex life is concerned is only the affair of yourself & your partner(s)." (5) Mike Resnick sold his first short story in 1959 at the age of 17. He spent many years writing novels under pseudonyms and editing for several magazines. In the 1980's he returned to writing science fiction, and has become a fixture on the awards ballots since that time. He's won four Hugo awards for his short stories (all four are here at Fictionwise) and one Nebula award (also here!) along with nineteen Hugo nominations and eight Nebula nominations. His most acclaimed short works are the Kirinyaga stories, based on a terraformed planet made to resemble the African mountain, Mt. Kenya (Kirinyaga). Mike has been to Africa numerous times. |
"I
knew absolutely nothing about Chicago. I got there at night,
coming in on the Eisenhower Expressway, and somehow got on Lake
Shore Drive headed north. I had never been in such fast traffic.
I was on the outside lane and couldn't get to the inside to get
off. I ended up maybe 20 miles north before I could turn around
and get off. I'll never forget my first sight of those Chicago
high rises along LSD, as it was known locally. I nearly ran off
the road staring at them. Toto, we ain't in Kansas any
more!"
"I had to laugh when I much later saw the
movie Men In Black - that part where Will Smith and
Tommie Lee Jones are looking through the tabloids to see what
the latest scoop is about aliens. The public has no idea how
close that is to the truth. Sure, there's a lot of made-up crap
in the tabloids, but there's also a lot of it (or used to be)
that was planted by intelligence agencies to float a trial
balloon to gauge public reaction. Also, there was information
that certain agencies wouldn't let out, but the agents felt it
should be and so they leaked stuff to places like us that could
be easily discredited. I mean, who ya' gonna believe - the CIA
or the National Insider? This way, it at least got out on
the public record and nobody got hurt or fired or killed -
because of where it was printed. Had it been in the New York
Times or Chicago Tribune, there might have been hell
to pay"
"We ran certain columns - one was called Heretics,
and it dealt with the most outrageous points of view you could think
of for the time. Some of our guest columnists included L. Ron
Hubbard, Kerry Thornley (an Oswald buddy) (2), Jayne Mansfield,
at right (3) and several others I can't
even think of. Oh, yeah, even Anton LaVey was in there (4). That's how
I met Bruce Roberts.
"Hubbard was on the outs with his
Scientologists and was paranoid as hell; he said they were trying to
kill him. This is what he was saying, not writing in his columns. We
had a reporter there named Jack who was a Scientologist, a real fan
of Hubbard and who brought Hubbard in out of the cold, so to speak.
Both our editors, Michael Resnick (5) and Paul G. Neimark, were big
science fiction buffs (Mike) and writers (both). Mike went on to
write "42 novels, 12 short story collections,
140 short stories, 2 screenplays, and editor of 30 anthologies.
4 Hugos (scifi's Oscar), plus other awards here and in France,
Japan, Croatia, Poland and Spain. I've appeared in 23 languages
so far." (E-mail from Mike Resnick to Jim Moore, 9 May
2002) I wrote a column called Inside
the News and a few others about the hippie generation, plus my
job was to do investigative articles." (Mike Resnick at
left)
"The man I knew as Bruce Roberts showed up at
our office in 1967, just after I had written an article that flatly
stated Robert Kennedy would be assassinated and would never live to
the see the White House. He asked for me by the name of Arthur C.
Richards, one of the pseudonyms I wrote under at that time (another
pseudonym was E. W. Steele). He did not call his box of papers
'gemstones' or anything else. It was, he said, the 'true' history of
the Kennedy assassination - and a lot more.