The JFK Assassination: House of Mystery Radio Show Presents

Sins Of The Father

Interview with Mark Shaw

The place to start was with a book called, The Poison Patriarch: How the Betrayals of Joseph P. Kennedy Caused the Assassination of JFK, written by Mark Shaw, a lawyer turned author. The following is from the first of three interviews with Shaw in 2018. He wrote three very well researched books on the JFK assassination and was great at explaining his positions and displaying primary sources for them. Shaw is also a very nice man to converse with.

Q. How did you come to write this book, The Poison Patriarch?

A. In the 1980s, I practiced law in San Francisco with Melvin Belli. For those people who don’t know, he was a bombastic, flamboyant lawyer, and in the 20 th century, he represented some of the most famous people. With clients like the Rolling Stones, Tammy Fay Baker, and Muhammad Ali, he was in the middle of the action all the time. I got to know Mister Belli, and we became pretty good friends. So, when he died in 1996, I noticed that he had written two autobiographies. But the information about himself in the books conflicted.

He was known best as the King of Torts. He was a great personal injury lawyer. He sued everybody and everything and got big damages amounts. So, when he died in 1996, I thought I would write some sort of biography on him? So, I did, in the mid-2000s.

While I was working on that book, I learned a great deal about Belli, and one of his most famous clients that people didn’t know about was Jack Ruby, who shot Lee Harvey Oswald. They also didn’t know that Belli was very much affiliated with the underworld. His main client at the time, just before the Ruby case and the assassination, was Mickey Cohen. ¹

During this research, I interviewed a doctor friend of Belli’s in San Diego, and the friend told me that Belli knew a woman named Dorothy Kilgallen. ² She was a famous New York Journal-American reporter and author, who had a column spread to 200 newspapers throughout the country. So, we started talking about Belli and Kilgallen. He said at the end of the conversation, It’s interesting when Dorothy Kilgallen died, Belli said, ‘They’ve killed Dorothy, now they’ll go after Jack Ruby.’ That really made me stop and think about Belli and his representation of Ruby. It made me look back in time and see how it all might have fit in with the assassination of JFK, and the part Joseph Kennedy ³ might have played in the death of his son John.

Q. How did you tie Joe Kennedy into the assassination?

A. Well, the affiliation of Belli with the Mafia, and then his representation of Jack Ruby. As a former criminal defense lawyer, the defense of Ruby never made sense to me at all. You know this Psychomotor Epilepsy insanity defense that he came up with just seemed to make little sense to anyone except Belli.

So, I went back to the 1960 election to see what happened. That was just three years before JFK died. I wanted to see if I could focus on using primary sources and not speculation. What I found was that Joe Kennedy wanted to be President of the United States, and there was no question about that with everything I read.

Stepping up the ladder was the first thing, as he was appointed the Ambassador to Great Britain. He spent time over there, and unfortunately, before World War II, it was pretty well known that he cuddled up to Adolph Hitler. Joe got in trouble for that, and his reputation suffered a great deal because of it.

So, when he came back to the United States, he said, Well, I’m not going to be President of the United States, because of my reputation being damaged, one of my sons will be. The first one, of course, was going to be his son Joe. Unfortunately, Joe died in the war. Well, who is next up? That’s JFK. So, right away, as I learned, Joe put all of his money and power into making JFK the President of the United States. The first thing was to become a senator. Joe used all of his political power.

In the 1960 election, and you might remember, since this has been pretty well chronicled, they got into trouble with the election. They were up against Nixon, and it looked like everything went well after that terrible debate that Nixon went through. But they soon realized that unless they won Illinois and West Virginia, they would lose the election with the electoral votes.

One of the things that I tried to do in the book is to point out that Joe being involved in bootlegging and everything else in his past was really a lot of speculation. That said, Joe did have connections with the Mafia. One of those connections came through the Kennedy friend Frank Sinatra, who knew gangsters like Sam Giancana, ⁴ Carlos Marcello, ⁵ Trafficante, ⁶and all of those guys. Joe went to Frank Sinatra and asked for some help in Illinois. Well, as you may remember, Illinois was as corrupt as any state has ever been in the world. That was because of Mayor Daley in Chicago, and Giancana was part of that with Daley. Joe Kennedy went to Sinatra and said look, Could you do something for us so that we can win Illinois? And also, we’re going to need some help with the unions in West Virginia. Sinatra did his job, and that is very well chronicled.

So, they win Illinois, and they win West Virginia, and they win the Presidential election. Well, there was a deal that was made, a deal with the devil. I have primary witnesses who were right there when Joe Kennedy made the deal – if the underworld characters, such as Giancana, Marcello, and those guys, helped them win those two states, Joe promised that when they got into the White House, they would leave those guys alone. They would not pursue those underworld characters.

Q. So, where did the trouble begin, and why?

A. Well, those underworld guys take people at their word. So, they are absolutely amazed and shocked when Joe Kennedy forced JFK to appoint Bobby Kennedy Attorney General. One of the most important parts of the book is that I have an eyewitness to that happening. John Seigenthaler was a presidential aide to Bobby. He became one of the founders of USA Today and a celebrated journalist. He was there that night when Bobby Kennedy said, I do want to be Attorney General. JFK said, I don’t want to appoint him Attorney General. But Joe Kennedy said, That is going to happen, and that is all there is to it. The next day Bobby Kennedy was appointed Attorney General.

Predictably, Bobby Kennedy, wanting to make a name for himself, had already gone after the mobsters in the McClellan Committee. ⁷ One of the first things he did, just three months into the administration, was to deport Carlos Marcello, the New Orleans Don and Giancana’s best buddy, to Central America.

They deported him, and he was thrown into the jungle. It was just a terrible situation. He later returned to the United States. But that signaled to those underworld characters that Joe Kennedy was double-crossing them.

Through Bobby Kennedy, Joe went after James Hoffa, then Trafficante, then Marcello, and then they went after Giancana and all of those guys. One thing I’m telling you, you can’t do is double-cross those kinds of people.

Q. So what happened next?

A. Well, as we get to the end of 1963, Carlos Marcello was about to be deported again, and he was facing a racketeering trial in New Orleans. His back is up against the wall. What’s he going to do to get himself out of this situation? Marcello decided, "Look, I need to stop this. It can’t go any