Target Lancer

CHAPTER 21

Do you remember where you were when President Kennedy was killed? Even if you weren’t alive at the time, you surely know that a sniper in a high window was waiting for JFK to ride by on that infamous day in November.

In Dallas.

Friday, November 29, 1963

In Chicago, around ten P.M., after a long day of work and a quick bite to eat, I got on the El in the Loop, taking the subway south to Thirty-fifth and Wabash. At the White Sox stop, I got off in what used to be called the Section, where colored folk had wound up, coming to Chicago in that first big northward swing after World War I. Jazz had got its start in the Section, Chicago-style anyway, and the area was still rife with filthy streets, broken-down buildings, and greasy spoons. Walking east on Thirty-fifth, the only honky around, I might have felt scared if the nine-mil wasn’t under my arm.

Since last Friday, I hadn’t gone anywhere unarmed.

In my experience, you avoided trouble in Bronzeville by not looking for it. Move easy, cool, confident. No eye contact, not even with those two high-yellow gals in tight dresses striding your way, emphasizing their hip sway and wearing grins half come-on, half dare. If you hear footsteps on the sidewalk behind you, too fast for your taste, just half turn and walk sideways a few steps. Hardly anything really to worry about.

At Thirty-fifth and State-heart of the Section-were the dives where Jelly Roll Morton once played. At Thirty-fifth and Indiana, I wondered if I’d missed the place; but there it was on the northwest corner, a brick storefront with a Schlitz saloon sign and a banner that boldly announced MUDDY WATERS amp; BAND-FRI, SAT, SUN.

Inside, Smitty’s was dark, crowded, and smoky. Moving through the loud bar into the club area, where the brown walls peeled paint and a sign advertised CHEEBURGERS, I spotted Eben Boldt and a good-looking Negro woman, both dressed casually but nice-dark suit, light blue dress-seated toward the front among quiet couples at checker-clothed, postage-stamp tables.

Joining Eben, I was introduced to his friendly wife, Barbara, a schoolteacher pretty enough to worry Diahann Carroll.

The show hadn’t started yet, but the drums, piano, several guitars on stands, and several amplifiers were waiting up on the small stage.

“You will dig this, Nate,” Eben said. “You really will.”

“What’s it like around the office these days?”

“A morgue, only more depressing. Martineau’s had three meetings so far, reminding us to stay mum about that week you were with us.”

I shook my head. “First time I saw those Dallas cops dragging Oswald through that police station, I thought he was Vallee. My God they look alike.”

And when I’d been watching Sunday morning and saw the stocky figure in the fedora lurch forward and fire his gun into Lee Harvey Oswald, I knew it was Ruby. Didn’t have to see his face. Just the shape of him.

“Here’s some more cheap irony you’ll enjoy,” Eben said. “Mayor Daley got the city council today to rename the Northwest Expressway the Kennedy Expressway.”

“Yeah, I saw. They should have the ribbon cutting at the West Jackson exit.”

“Actually, they are.”

“Aw, please.…”

“Swear to God, Nate. Next week. There’ll be a ceremony with more Irish politicians than an alderman’s wake. Bobby Kennedy was invited, but declined.”

“Yeah, he’s keeping his head pulled in. I don’t think you’ll see him doing much traveling in the foreseeable future.”

I had warned him. We had a talk, a late-night phone call, from “a secure line” Bobby said, Saturday, November second. I hadn’t told him chapter and verse-I’d left out specific names, like Richard Cain and Jack Ruby-but I did tell him what had really happened at IPP, and that I believed Operation Mongoose was riddled with cancer cells.

“I know, Nate. We’re looking into it. We’re all over it.”

“Bob, do me one small favor. Convince your brother to stay out of open cars for a while.”

“Can’t do it, Nate. You try telling him. We have an election to win. We’re okay. We know what we’re dealing with.”

“Do you?”

Eben said, “Something else I heard, and this you will simply not believe.”

“Pretty sure I will. I have a low disbelief threshold these days.”

Even though nobody in this mostly Negro crowd gave two diddleys what we were saying, Eben leaned in and damn near whispered.

“On the Monday before the assassination,” Eben said, “the eighteenth? The Service was dealing with a serious threat in Tampa for the President’s visit. An FBI source indicated an unidentified sniper in a high window in a tall building, with a high-power rifle with scope, would try to take JFK out.”

I noticed Barbara had a rather long-suffering look on her lovely face. Who could blame her?

“They even had a suspect,” her husband was saying, “a former defector named Lopez. Part of the Tampa Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Sound familiar?”

“That’s who Oswald was with in New Orleans, it’s claimed. So they had an Oswald … a Vallee … ready to go in Tampa, too?”

“Nate, they were stalking the President all month. All damn month.”

“I figured that we’d shut the thing down,” I said, with an Atlas-worthy sigh. “But Chicago was just Plan A. There was a Plan B in Tampa, and Plan C in Dallas.”

Barbara said, “Third time’s a charm.”

A cute waitress came and took our orders; she seemed fascinated by me, like a Martian had walked in the place. I couldn’t quite tell if she was flirting or afraid. We all had beer, and that was the last JFK talk for a while, unless you counted Muddy Waters singing “Sad, Sad Day.”

When the band took its break, I said, “I dig this electrified blues. I think it could give rock ’n’ roll a run for the money.”

“When the white kids hear it,” Barbara said, “they’ll steal it.”

Eben said, “Nate, I don’t care what Martineau says. I’m going to testify at the Warren Commission.”

The papers and TV had been full of that all day-LBJ establishing the President’s Commission on the assassination of President Kennedy.

“Ebe, don’t even think about it. Allen Dulles is on that damn thing-former CIA director? It’s a dog and pony show, full of people who hated Kennedy. Stay away from it.”

“Somebody’s got to come forward. What can they do to me?”

“Fire you,” Barbara said.

Ebe smiled at her and patted her hand. “Honey, I can always get a job with Nate Heller.”

* * *

If only it had been that easy.

The winter day in 1964 when Eben Boldt went to Washington, D.C., to testify to the Warren Commission, both about the covered-up Chicago plot and the misconduct he’d witnessed on the President’s protection detail-the drinking, the carousing, the racism-he was arrested and sent back to Chicago. The accusation? He had supposedly tried to extort $50,000 out of a counterfeiter by sharing a secret file with him.

This book would be at least one-hundred pages longer if I were to share with you the work the A-1 did pro bono for Ebe’s various attorneys over the years. Even when I was able to get the counterfeiter to recant, to admit having perjured himself on the stand, Eben Boldt remained behind bars. Despite the Supreme Court reviewing the serious misconduct of a judge who’d advised the jury that the defendant seemed guilty, behind bars Eben remained. The counterfeiter, by the way, was a close associate of Mad Sam DeStefano. I always suspected Dick Cain of being behind the frame-up.

When he was paroled in 1969, Eben did not return to law enforcement. He didn’t even want the job I offered him. Instead he became a quality-control supervisor in the automobile industry. For forty years, he has attempted to clear his name. Documents at the Chicago Secret Service Office that might have cleared him-concerning, among other things, the Chicago assassination plot-were “routinely” destroyed in 1995. His efforts and those of others to get Congress and/or the President to restore his good name have also failed. To date.

I like to think Marty Martineau didn’t have anything to do with the railroading of Eben Boldt. He continued his distinguished government service for many years, but when asked about the four-man assassination squad-or about the lone nut, Vallee-he was vague and even evasive. Still, he was one of the few Secret Service agents willing to go on record saying that the JFK assassination was a conspiracy. He died at ninety-five.

On December 3, 1963, Thomas Arthur Vallee briefly surfaced in Chicago newspapers covering the brave cops who had seized the “Gun-Toting Kennedy Foe.” Charges against him were never pressed. On the rare occasions when Vallee was tracked down by a journalist-fascinated by such details as Oswald having also served at a U-2 base in Japan-the interview subject insisted he’d been framed by his CIA handlers, and seemed to realize that he’d narrowly escaped the role that Lee Harvey Oswald played in history. Still working as a printer, Vallee died in 1988 in Houston, where he lived in a ramshackle trailer with a well-oiled M-1 propped near his bedside.

Berkeley Moyland, the honest Chicago police lieutenant who alerted the Secret Service to Vallee, was instructed by the Secret Service in late 1963 never to share his knowledge of the Chicago assassination attempt. But in his final years, he told his son the story, adding that Vallee had later sent him a thank-you card. Apparently the ex-Marine believed Moyland had saved his life.

The two cops who had been so highly recommended by Sheriff’s Chief Investigator Richard Cain gained notoriety in a later case. In December 1969, the pair-acting as state’s attorney raiders-burst into black activist Fred Hampton’s apartment, kicking the door down, showering the place with bullets, and killing Hampton and another Black Panther leader. The detectives spent years in and out of court, fighting claims that they were CIA or FBI agents on a “black op,” an ironically apt euphemism for this incident, widely termed a massacre. Whether they are alive or dead, I couldn’t tell you. But the last time I saw Gross, he was gray and nervous, his family life ruined under a crush of massive legal bills.

The gangsters met various well-deserved deaths: Mad Sam DeStefano, shotgunned in his garage, 1973; Sam Giancana, shot in the head while frying sausage and peppers, 1975; Jimmy Hoffa, disappeared, 1975; Johnny Rosselli, strangled, shot, dismembered, 1976; Chuckie Nicoletti, shot in the head three times, 1977.

Santo Trafficante died by the knife in 1987-the surgeon’s scalpel, on an operating table at the end of a long battle with heart disease and other ailments. Carlos Marcello died in 1993, a hopeless imbecile thanks to Alzheimer’s; when still of sound mind, he confessed a major role in the JFK assassination to his attorney, Frank Ragano, and also implicated Hoffa.

Awaiting a new trial, Jack Ruby died of cancer at Parkland Hospital, where JFK had been pronounced dead. Ruby felt he’d been poisoned, and during his incarceration became increasingly bold about denying full culpability in the shooting of everybody’s favorite lone-nut assassin, saying shortly before his death, “I was framed to kill Oswald.”

Sally Rand had a very successful engagement at the Silver Frolics in January 1964, though shortly thereafter the place was indeed shut down, then torn down, in its place a parking ramp erected for employees of the nearby Chicago Sun-Times. Helen gained national prominence that same year when she was invited to perform for the astronauts at the Astrodome in Houston, with new President Lyndon Johnson hosting. The event was given a certain inaccurate permanence in the Academy Award-winning 1983 film The Right Stuff, whose soft-focus gaze implied a much younger fan dancer. She’d have loved that.

Helen and I remained close over the years, but never moved in together, much less married. Her only lasting marriage was to her career, and she managed to keep Sally Rand in front of the public, performing her fan dance as late as 1979, the year of her death.

Richard Cain, as time passed, was revealed as a cop who was also an Outfit member-a made man who had been not just a bagman but an assassin. Some think he was involved in the Dallas hit, that perhaps he was even one of the shooters, though with his lousy eyesight, I doubt it. Cain was, however, the guy who notified the FBI where and when Oswald’s infamous Mannlicher-Carcano had been purchased in Chicago.

In 1964, Cain was fired from the sheriff’s department for lying to a grand jury in a stolen drugs case, serving six months for perjury, and in 1968 went to prison as an accomplice in a bank robbery. When he got out in 1971, he became Sam Giancana’s right-hand man and chief courier, during Mooney’s Mexico days. Returning to Chicago in ’73, Cain began informing on other Outfit guys to FBI agent Bill Roemer, clearing a path for his own planned takeover.

A few days before Christmas 1973, I caught up with Dick Cain at Rose’s Sandwich Shop on West Grand on the West Side. I was in my sixties now, and he was in his forties, but he looked ten years older. Sitting at a table by himself, he wore a black suit with a conservative tie. Hair longer, some silver in it, even sideburns. Hell, I had them, too.

Rose’s was just a hole-in-the-wall diner, with maybe eight tables and a counter. Jelly Cozzo owned the joint, and Outfit guys were his regular clientele, probably because of his mother’s recipes for spaghetti, ravioli, and lasagna. Jelly, a fairly bad dude in his day, served red wine and Zinfandel, too, though he had no liquor license.

Dick was having some spaghetti. I knew now that his real last name was Scalzitti. But he was also drinking a Coke and had a Dunhill going in an ashtray. Some things never changed. Like the dark-rimmed Buddy Holly glasses.

And the milky left eye.

I sat down. He looked up and frowned-his eyesight really was lousy, plus I looked older-and then he smiled.

“Nate Heller,” he said. “What the hell.”

He put his fork down and extended his hand and we shook. The waitress (there was only one, a little Annette Funicello look-alike who needed her mustache waxed) came and took my order-I had a Coke, too, and she brought it right over.

“My God,” he said, “how long as it been?”

“Since the sixties, anyway. I hear you had a falling-out with Mooney.”

“Naw, everything’s fine there. I just decided to go my own way.”

“Dick, I wanted to warn you about something.”

“Really? What?”

“I still keep my hand in at the A-1. Not completely retired, you know.”

“I didn’t know, but … what’s happening?”

I leaned in confidentially. “One of my guys picked up on a very dangerous rumor. It just can’t be true. It’s crazy.”

“Try me, Nate.”

“Well, it’s a coup. Scheduled for New Year’s Eve. Word is you’ve reached out to various contract guys around the country, and plan to hit every single mob boss in town, here and in Vegas and all over the place. All at the same time. Midnight, to ring in the New Year.”

He laughed. “That does sound screwy. Naw, that’s not me, Nate. You know I’m a stand-up guy.”

“I know you been working with Marshall Caifano. Advising him what houses his burglary crew should hit. But that sounds frankly … small-time to me, Dick. I mean, when I heard this crazy story about an Outfit coup? On some weird level, it made sense. Just the kind of elaborate, Machiavellian kinda shit you might come up with.”

“Naw. No. You heard wrong.”

I finished my Coke, gave him a smile. “Well, I heard this from one of my guys, and I thought I better let you know. Wrong people hear this, you could have a problem.”

He was nodding. “I appreciate it, Nate. I do appreciate it. Old times’ sake, huh?”

“Well, I owe you from way back, Dick. Always like to pay my debts.”

I gave him a wave, paid for the Coke, and headed out to West Grand, where a beater Ford was pulled in at a meter just down the way. I gave the two guys in the car a nice slow nod, and they started pulling on the ski masks. As I cut across the street to where my Jag was parked, I heard the crackle of a walkie-talkie: “He’s in there.”

Over my motor starting up, I could hear screams, and yells from guys ordering patrons around, and then a blast that just had to be both barrels of a shotgun.

The papers didn’t give the details, but a cop pal who had hated Dick Cain, too, reported that indeed both barrels of a shotgun had been fired up under Dick’s chin, tearing away the right side of his face. The downside? That meant an instantaneous death.

I still had the building in Old Town, though several years earlier, I had converted it into three floors of living space. I’d remodeled some, but that’s not the point.

The point is that around nine that evening, I got Tom Ellison’s wife on the phone. We hadn’t talked in a while, and we had a very nice catching-up session. Her kids were grown and fine. She hadn’t remarried, and the sound of her voice was such that I thought I might one of these days drive to Milwaukee and take her out for a nice meal.

For now, though, it was time to wrap up the conversation.

“Nice talking to you, Jean. But the reason I called.”

“Yes, Nate?”

“Remember how I told you, sometimes it takes years to take care of certain matters?”

“… I do.”

“Well, I just wanted you to know, something happened today.”

“Oh?”

“I think Tom would be pleased.”

And I hung up.