Hall’s step-sons believe their dad was involved in the plot to kill JFK:
A Florida tie to the JFK assassination shows why secret records need releasing
Skip was the nickname for Loren E. Hall Sr., who was married to Pappas’ mother. A soldier of fortune, Hall was prominent in the Free Cuba paramilitary forces trying to overthrow the government of Fidel Castro.
Hall had been circulating in Dallas, trying to raise money for the cause. Some supporters harbored a bitter hatred of President Kennedy, blaming him for the failed invasion at the Bay of Pigs and angry that Kennedy had abandoned the island to Communist rule.
Weeks after Kennedy was murdered, Skip came to Jim’s younger brother, John Pappas, with a rifle. It was a Carcano, an Italian military carbine made at the same factory as the one that killed the president.
When Hall handed over the rifle, he told his stepson to put it away and never to speak of it. For 57 years, John Pappas kept that secret. This past spring, however, he started talking with his brother about the rifle, and together they approached me with their suspicions that their mother’s husband was part of a plot to murder the president.
Over six months, I interviewed the Pappas brothers several times. We consulted firearms experts, family records and old court files.
John Pappas sent the rifle for testing and examination to Lucien “Luke” Haag, a firearms expert in Arizona. Although it came from the same Italian armory as Oswald’s, Haag determined that it was an older version that took slightly larger bullets than the two that hit JFK.
Months after he handed over that rifle to his stepson, Skip told John something else about the assassination: there were two people on the Grassy Knoll, where witnesses said they saw a shooter. One was there to kill JFK. The other was there to make sure it happened.
For years after the assassination, Skip remained a subject of great interest — for the supermarket tabloids, for New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison, and for the House Select Committee, which questioned him in secret. Leading up to that interview, the committee sent its chief lawyer to the Central Intelligence Agency.
“On 1 September 1977 Blakey (the committee lawyer) requested all CIA information on a man named Loren Hall,” reads a CIA memo from the time. “Blakey stated to me that the Committee investigators had some reason to believe that Hall may have had some association with the Agency … (and that Hall) was in some ‘deep trouble.’”
Skip’s potential connection to the CIA came up again in 1989 during a federal drug case in Oklahoma. Skip enlisted three of his own children and two other people to run a crystal meth lab, the government charged.
When he pleaded guilty, Skip’s son Loren Hall Jr. told the judge, “My father was involved heavily, at least to our understanding, with the CIA as far as aiding the Contras (and) taking weapons over to them. And he came to us, he came to me one day and said that he was involved in the running of guns to Nicaragua and that he needed some help, they were — they had oil that was being used to make methamphetamine that was supposedly helping the CIA.”
“Of course,” the younger Hall continued, “later I found out that wasn’t exactly the way everything went down.”
After his kids were arrested, Skip flew back to the U.S. from Central America and surrendered. In a court filing, Skip said he put up $17,000 in cash for the drug ingredients and equipment, but he needed a public defender because he could not afford his own lawyer.
The other defendants pleaded guilty and were sentenced in open court. Skip’s plea and sentence were in secret, and the transcripts were sealed in a vault. He faced 20 years in prison. Judging from federal probation records, he served less than a year, and his probation was cut short after one more year. Two years later, Skip died.
My request to the Central Intelligence Agency under the Freedom of Information Act yielded hundreds of pages of copies, all of them related to the JFK assassination. There was nothing about Skip’s activities in Central America or about the drug case.
https://www.tampabay.com/opinion/2021/10/07/a-florida-tie-to-the-jfk-assassination-shows-why-secret-records-need-releasing-column/
