Question to Bruce and Jimmy about James Hoffa:

[Slav]

Tommy we can’t take what others say personally we have to keep going, your membership is wanted and needed and your efforts are outstanding, please done give up.So I left my house today drove down the street and I see a tbird I’m thinking Tommy’s here to whack me. First time I seen one local in years.

[Bob]

Check out this article from the Boston Globe in 2013 about Bobby Kennedy and who he thought was behind his brother's assassination.https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/ ... y.htmlHere is part of the piece:It was no coincidence that Bobby would turn to a labor lawyer for intel on organized crime. As the crusading chief counsel of the Senate Rackets Committee in the 1950s, Bobby had made a national name for himself by grilling leading gangsters as he exposed the nefarious connections between the mob and American labor unions.His chief nemesis during these hearings was Jimmy Hoffa, the squat, bull-faced leader of the Teamsters union. Bobby accused Hoffa of funneling millions in worker pension funds into a money-laundering scheme with mob leaders. That alliance bought the Teamster leader muscle to silence his enemies and scare corporate leaders into submission.Bobby had been unrelenting in his war against these mob and labor leaders, ignoring the admonition of his father to choose less violence-prone targets and dismissing the underworld threats against his own life. Instead, Bobby had doubled down, even persuading his brother Jack, then a senator, to join the cause. About the only security measure Bobby had accepted, following an anonymous threat that acid might be thrown at the faces of his young children, was to have the kids wait in the principal’s office at the end of each school day, rather than outside, for Ethel to pick them up.After Jack became president and he attorney general, Bobby wasted little time in leveraging the full force of the Justice Department to try to crush these corrupt characters. Now, as he strode around Hickory Hill, reeling from the news of the assassination, Bobby couldn’t help but wonder if one of them had been behind it.An immediate focus, according to several of his aides with direct knowledge, was Hoffa. Bobby knew that a year earlier, according to a Teamster middle-manager turned FBI informant, Hoffa had complained, “I’ve got to do something about that son of a bitch Bobby Kennedy. He’s got to go.” Hoffa had also allegedly asked that informant if he knew anything about “plastic explosives” and suggested opportunities for getting Kennedy, when he was swimming alone in his pool at home or driving alone in his convertible, according to historian David Kaiser’s book, “The Road to Dallas.”Bobby knew he had given Hoffa and his heavyweight mob pals plenty of new reasons to want to cut him down. At the same time the shots were being fired in Dallas, Bobby’s Justice Department was preparing for the jury-tampering trial of Hoffa in Nashville, which had sprung from its unremitting probe of the Teamster leader. From the federal courthouse there, Walter Sheridan, who had been Bobby’s aide-de-camp in the mob war ever since the Rackets Committee, told his boss in another phone call RFK made that afternoon that he hadn’t been able to find any evidence linking Hoffa to the assassination.But, according to an oral history that Sheridan would eventually give to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Sheridan later informed Bobby that Hoffa had been at a restaurant when he learned JFK had been shot. The reaction of the pugnacious labor leader was unlike that of most other Americans. “He got up on the table,” Sheridan said, “and cheered.”Meanwhile, another Mafia leader and Hoffa associate, Carlos Marcello, sat in that New Orleans courtroom, awaiting his verdict. The second deportation trial for Marcello, who ran the mob in New Orleans and Dallas, was the culmination of a relentless three-year campaign by Bobby’s team to get him out of the country.While not on trial at the time, another mob leader close to Hoffa was also chafing under the intense scrutiny of the Justice Department. Santo Trafficante Jr. was the Florida mob boss and former big-time Havana casino owner who lost millions when Castro took over Cuba. (Trafficante had been imprisoned in Cuba in 1959. His visitors during that stretch, according to Kaiser, included Dallas nightclub owner and mob foot soldier Jack Ruby, who gunned down Oswald in the basement of Dallas police headquarters two days after JFK’s murder.)In addition to lots of underworld associations, Trafficante and Hoffa even shared a lawyer, Frank Ragano. In his book “Mob Lawyer,” Ragano detailed how Hoffa had instructed him in the summer of 1963 to tell Trafficante and Marcello that the time had come to kill the president. He thought Hoffa was just venting, and delivered the message jokingly, but said the two mobsters seemed to take it much more seriously.Marcello ended up being acquitted in New Orleans the same day that the president was killed. While serving time later in life, he was caught on a federal wiretap confessing to an FBI informant that he’d had JFK killed, according to FBI files released under the JFK Records Act of 1992.Trafficante is also alleged to have made a deathbed confession of his involvement to his lawyer, expressing regret that maybe the gun should have been pointed at Bobby.Another member of this rogue’s gallery of suspects was Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana. This is the same Giancana who, it would later be revealed, had shared a mistress with JFK. The Chicago boss had been put under such smothering government surveillance during 1963 that Kaiser, the “Road to Dallas” author, argues it had crossed over into harassment. In a recent interview, Kaiser said he believes Marcello, Trafficante, and probably Giancana — likely at the behest of Hoffa — were all involved in putting in motion the hit on JFK.As for Giancana, he was expected to testify in 1975 before a Senate subcommittee co-chaired by Gary Hart of Colorado. Established to investigate the JFK assassination, the subcommittee was the first official body to openly question the lone-gunman narrative of the Warren Commission. But before Giancana could appear, his bullet-riddled body was found in his basement in suburban Chicago. The dismembered body of another mob witness, Boston-born Johnny Rosselli, was found in a drum floating off Florida, after he had testified in front of Hart’s panel.Hart said in a recent interview that he remains flabbergasted by US law enforcement’s lack of interest in solving those two grisly murders. “You had a new set of suspects — those who had motives to be angry at John and Robert Kennedy. When you think about that for 10 seconds, the implications are pretty huge,” Hart said, adding, “If you can find out who killed Rosselli and Giancana, you may have an answer to the mystery of the century.”Even in the absence of that answer, it is clear Bobby knew just how desperate these underworld characters were to stop his war against them. And beyond that, they had a more-than-passing interest in Bobby’s oversight of the administration’s Cuba portfolio.***‘One of your guys did it,” Bobby said matter-of-factly, calling from Hickory Hill later on Nov. 22.He was speaking to Enrique “Harry” Williams, a veteran of the Bay of Pigs operation and the Cuban exile whom Bobby trusted most. Journalist Haynes Johnson happened to be with Williams in Washington’s Ebbitt Hotel at the time, and he later wrote about how stunned he was when Williams hung up the phone and relayed the attorney general’s comments.In the time that Bobby had been overseeing his brother’s so-called Special Group team on Cuba, he had come to appreciate just how ungovernable the Cuban exile community could be. It hadn’t taken long on Nov. 22 for speculation to focus on the possible involvement of Fidel Castro, given the Kennedy administration’s repeated attempts to oust or assassinate the Communist leader. That speculation only intensified after the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, whose record of pro-Castro agitation quickly came to light. Yet it’s intriguing that Bobby’s suspicion of possible Cuban involvement seemed to focus squarely on the anti-Castro crowd.While he trusted Williams and wasn’t accusing him personally, Bobby knew how furious many members of the exile community had become with the Kennedys, based on the administration’s failure to go all out in the effort to topple Castro. The Kennedy brothers had refused to launch a full-scale military invasion of the island nation, and by 1963 had even begun authorizing some back-channel efforts toward compromise with both Castro and his Soviet benefactors. This, Bobby knew, would be viewed as intolerable by the most hard-line Cuban exiles.Just one day before his brother’s murder, Bobby had received a classified CIA report assessing the exile community’s reaction to a recent speech on Cuba policy that JFK had delivered in Miami. “The conservative and moderate elements were disappointed, having hoped for a more militant stand against the Castro revolution and regime,” stated the Nov. 21 report. Written by Richard Helms, the wily CIA deputy director who many believed was really running the agency, the report was contained in the confidential RFK Justice Department files released earlier this year.As Bobby’s post-assassination suspicions appeared to bounce from Cuba to the Mafia to the CIA, he surely had to confront the reality that the lines separating all three had become increasingly blurry. In those same newly released RFK files was a personal note that Helms had written to Bobby, flagging an article that had appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times in 1962. Headlined “CIA Sought Giancana Help for Cuba Spying,” the article described a “fantastic tale of attempted Cuba espionage” involving the Chicago mob boss and covert operatives for the government.This, of course, was the same Giancana whom Bobby had been doggedly trying to put away for years. The idea that the CIA would have turned to the mobster for a little help with Cuba would have seemed too outlandish for many Americans to believe. By now, however, Bobby knew the article had barely scratched the surface. The truth was a lot worse.In the spring of 1962, two CIA officials had showed up at the attorney general’s office to inform him that the Justice Department needed to drop its prosecution of a Giancana associate. When Bobby asked why the CIA was so intent on keeping Giancana happy, according to the 2007 Talbot book “Brothers,” one of the intelligence officers told him that “the CIA had enlisted the gangster in a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro.”There was actually a long secret alliance between the country’s covert intelligence agency and the underworld. In fact, it was older than the CIA itself. During World War II, as Talbot points out, the OSS — forerunner to the CIA — forged a deal enlisting several mob bosses “to help guard against enemy sabotage in the New York Harbor and to supply intelligence from their contacts in Italy.” Federal officials returned the favor by looking the other way as the mobsters consolidated their power in post-war America, pretending that organized crime did not exist on these shores.So even if Bobby Kennedy had been appalled in 1962 to learn that the CIA had tapped a reviled mobster to call in a hit on Castro, the idea of an alliance between these supposed white hats and black hats could hardly have been a surprise to him.

[Tommy Wilkens]

Thanks Slav..You know whats strange ? When I stepped away from our Forum here JFK Murder Solved Forum I searched out a few other Kennedy assassination forums and took a good look at them and I just couldn't stand it.Not cutting any of those forums down but the content the contributions were so lax so off point and so not updated.The ones I went to seemed very bush league.The moment I would sign off from them back I went to JFK Murder Solved Forum.Couldn't help but feel like I was back home again each time.After years now of be a member here since July 17,2013 .I like to hope and feel like I am a part of this group here and I must say I am very proud of that.So many here have contributed so much and I just hope what I have shared here has been helpful to the fellow members. You know Slav down here in Florida today is going to be 84 degrees and full blue sky's.I will have the T-Bird out for a cruise for sure.I have had the top down all winter long here.It may even get warm enough for a swim in our pool here at our house in Palm Coast today !!

[Bob]

Bob wrote:Check out this article from the Boston Globe in 2013 about Bobby Kennedy and who he thought was behind his brother's assassination.https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/ ... y.htmlHere is part of the piece:It was no coincidence that Bobby would turn to a labor lawyer for intel on organized crime. As the crusading chief counsel of the Senate Rackets Committee in the 1950s, Bobby had made a national name for himself by grilling leading gangsters as he exposed the nefarious connections between the mob and American labor unions.His chief nemesis during these hearings was Jimmy Hoffa, the squat, bull-faced leader of the Teamsters union. Bobby accused Hoffa of funneling millions in worker pension funds into a money-laundering scheme with mob leaders. That alliance bought the Teamster leader muscle to silence his enemies and scare corporate leaders into submission.Bobby had been unrelenting in his war against these mob and labor leaders, ignoring the admonition of his father to choose less violence-prone targets and dismissing the underworld threats against his own life. Instead, Bobby had doubled down, even persuading his brother Jack, then a senator, to join the cause. About the only security measure Bobby had accepted, following an anonymous threat that acid might be thrown at the faces of his young children, was to have the kids wait in the principal’s office at the end of each school day, rather than outside, for Ethel to pick them up.After Jack became president and he attorney general, Bobby wasted little time in leveraging the full force of the Justice Department to try to crush these corrupt characters. Now, as he strode around Hickory Hill, reeling from the news of the assassination, Bobby couldn’t help but wonder if one of them had been behind it.An immediate focus, according to several of his aides with direct knowledge, was Hoffa. Bobby knew that a year earlier, according to a Teamster middle-manager turned FBI informant, Hoffa had complained, “I’ve got to do something about that son of a bitch Bobby Kennedy. He’s got to go.” Hoffa had also allegedly asked that informant if he knew anything about “plastic explosives” and suggested opportunities for getting Kennedy, when he was swimming alone in his pool at home or driving alone in his convertible, according to historian David Kaiser’s book, “The Road to Dallas.”Bobby knew he had given Hoffa and his heavyweight mob pals plenty of new reasons to want to cut him down. At the same time the shots were being fired in Dallas, Bobby’s Justice Department was preparing for the jury-tampering trial of Hoffa in Nashville, which had sprung from its unremitting probe of the Teamster leader. From the federal courthouse there, Walter Sheridan, who had been Bobby’s aide-de-camp in the mob war ever since the Rackets Committee, told his boss in another phone call RFK made that afternoon that he hadn’t been able to find any evidence linking Hoffa to the assassination.But, according to an oral history that Sheridan would eventually give to the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Sheridan later informed Bobby that Hoffa had been at a restaurant when he learned JFK had been shot. The reaction of the pugnacious labor leader was unlike that of most other Americans. “He got up on the table,” Sheridan said, “and cheered.”Meanwhile, another Mafia leader and Hoffa associate, Carlos Marcello, sat in that New Orleans courtroom, awaiting his verdict. The second deportation trial for Marcello, who ran the mob in New Orleans and Dallas, was the culmination of a relentless three-year campaign by Bobby’s team to get him out of the country.While not on trial at the time, another mob leader close to Hoffa was also chafing under the intense scrutiny of the Justice Department. Santo Trafficante Jr. was the Florida mob boss and former big-time Havana casino owner who lost millions when Castro took over Cuba. (Trafficante had been imprisoned in Cuba in 1959. His visitors during that stretch, according to Kaiser, included Dallas nightclub owner and mob foot soldier Jack Ruby, who gunned down Oswald in the basement of Dallas police headquarters two days after JFK’s murder.)In addition to lots of underworld associations, Trafficante and Hoffa even shared a lawyer, Frank Ragano. In his book “Mob Lawyer,” Ragano detailed how Hoffa had instructed him in the summer of 1963 to tell Trafficante and Marcello that the time had come to kill the president. He thought Hoffa was just venting, and delivered the message jokingly, but said the two mobsters seemed to take it much more seriously.Marcello ended up being acquitted in New Orleans the same day that the president was killed. While serving time later in life, he was caught on a federal wiretap confessing to an FBI informant that he’d had JFK killed, according to FBI files released under the JFK Records Act of 1992.Trafficante is also alleged to have made a deathbed confession of his involvement to his lawyer, expressing regret that maybe the gun should have been pointed at Bobby.Another member of this rogue’s gallery of suspects was Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana. This is the same Giancana who, it would later be revealed, had shared a mistress with JFK. The Chicago boss had been put under such smothering government surveillance during 1963 that Kaiser, the “Road to Dallas” author, argues it had crossed over into harassment. In a recent interview, Kaiser said he believes Marcello, Trafficante, and probably Giancana — likely at the behest of Hoffa — were all involved in putting in motion the hit on JFK.As for Giancana, he was expected to testify in 1975 before a Senate subcommittee co-chaired by Gary Hart of Colorado. Established to investigate the JFK assassination, the subcommittee was the first official body to openly question the lone-gunman narrative of the Warren Commission. But before Giancana could appear, his bullet-riddled body was found in his basement in suburban Chicago. The dismembered body of another mob witness, Boston-born Johnny Rosselli, was found in a drum floating off Florida, after he had testified in front of Hart’s panel.Hart said in a recent interview that he remains flabbergasted by US law enforcement’s lack of interest in solving those two grisly murders. “You had a new set of suspects — those who had motives to be angry at John and Robert Kennedy. When you think about that for 10 seconds, the implications are pretty huge,” Hart said, adding, “If you can find out who killed Rosselli and Giancana, you may have an answer to the mystery of the century.”Even in the absence of that answer, it is clear Bobby knew just how desperate these underworld characters were to stop his war against them. And beyond that, they had a more-than-passing interest in Bobby’s oversight of the administration’s Cuba portfolio.***‘One of your guys did it,” Bobby said matter-of-factly, calling from Hickory Hill later on Nov. 22.He was speaking to Enrique “Harry” Williams, a veteran of the Bay of Pigs operation and the Cuban exile whom Bobby trusted most. Journalist Haynes Johnson happened to be with Williams in Washington’s Ebbitt Hotel at the time, and he later wrote about how stunned he was when Williams hung up the phone and relayed the attorney general’s comments.In the time that Bobby had been overseeing his brother’s so-called Special Group team on Cuba, he had come to appreciate just how ungovernable the Cuban exile community could be. It hadn’t taken long on Nov. 22 for speculation to focus on the possible involvement of Fidel Castro, given the Kennedy administration’s repeated attempts to oust or assassinate the Communist leader. That speculation only intensified after the arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald, whose record of pro-Castro agitation quickly came to light. Yet it’s intriguing that Bobby’s suspicion of possible Cuban involvement seemed to focus squarely on the anti-Castro crowd.While he trusted Williams and wasn’t accusing him personally, Bobby knew how furious many members of the exile community had become with the Kennedys, based on the administration’s failure to go all out in the effort to topple Castro. The Kennedy brothers had refused to launch a full-scale military invasion of the island nation, and by 1963 had even begun authorizing some back-channel efforts toward compromise with both Castro and his Soviet benefactors. This, Bobby knew, would be viewed as intolerable by the most hard-line Cuban exiles.Just one day before his brother’s murder, Bobby had received a classified CIA report assessing the exile community’s reaction to a recent speech on Cuba policy that JFK had delivered in Miami. “The conservative and moderate elements were disappointed, having hoped for a more militant stand against the Castro revolution and regime,” stated the Nov. 21 report. Written by Richard Helms, the wily CIA deputy director who many believed was really running the agency, the report was contained in the confidential RFK Justice Department files released earlier this year.As Bobby’s post-assassination suspicions appeared to bounce from Cuba to the Mafia to the CIA, he surely had to confront the reality that the lines separating all three had become increasingly blurry. In those same newly released RFK files was a personal note that Helms had written to Bobby, flagging an article that had appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times in 1962. Headlined “CIA Sought Giancana Help for Cuba Spying,” the article described a “fantastic tale of attempted Cuba espionage” involving the Chicago mob boss and covert operatives for the government.This, of course, was the same Giancana whom Bobby had been doggedly trying to put away for years. The idea that the CIA would have turned to the mobster for a little help with Cuba would have seemed too outlandish for many Americans to believe. By now, however, Bobby knew the article had barely scratched the surface. The truth was a lot worse.In the spring of 1962, two CIA officials had showed up at the attorney general’s office to inform him that the Justice Department needed to drop its prosecution of a Giancana associate. When Bobby asked why the CIA was so intent on keeping Giancana happy, according to the 2007 Talbot book “Brothers,” one of the intelligence officers told him that “the CIA had enlisted the gangster in a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro.”There was actually a long secret alliance between the country’s covert intelligence agency and the underworld. In fact, it was older than the CIA itself. During World War II, as Talbot points out, the OSS — forerunner to the CIA — forged a deal enlisting several mob bosses “to help guard against enemy sabotage in the New York Harbor and to supply intelligence from their contacts in Italy.” Federal officials returned the favor by looking the other way as the mobsters consolidated their power in post-war America, pretending that organized crime did not exist on these shores.So even if Bobby Kennedy had been appalled in 1962 to learn that the CIA had tapped a reviled mobster to call in a hit on Castro, the idea of an alliance between these supposed white hats and black hats could hardly have been a surprise to him.I'm surprised that no one in the forum discussed this article. Lots of great information and insight.