Indications We'll Never Learn Who Killed JFK, Hoffa, or Garrison's Investigation

[Tom Scully]

The only thing I am certain of is Bill Brown's assessment of Ruth is no more reliable than DiEugenio's and most readers of this
are about Jim Garrison. The tendency in all of us, because we can't know the extent of what we are unaware of and the effect of that deficit on our chances of arriving at anything close to reliable conclusions, is to convince ourselves we know enough and it has to be the way we have decided it is.

https://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/10063046-181/smith-to-this-day-ruth
Smith: To this day, Ruth Paine lives with the murder of JFK.
CHRIS SMITH  THE PRESS DEMOCRAT September 20, 2019
Ruth Hyde Paine is excited to be flying for the first time from Santa Rosa to Dallas.....

......She’s scheduled to answer questions at the theater alongside former Warren Commission attorneys Howard Willens, Burt Griffin and David Slawson, and also Bernie Weismann, who placed in the Dallas Morning News on the morning of the assassination a John Birch Society-affiliated ad critical of Kennedy......

https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=62237&relPageId=187
2. FBI 62-109090 Warren Commission HQ File, Section 25, pg 187
Found in: FBI Warren Commission Liaison File (62-109090)
WILLENS, Assistant to Rankin Willens was investigated by the Bureau in 1955 for the position of law clerk in the Antitrust Division of the Department.
investigations revealed no derogatory information concerning 'him; however, some derogatory information was developed concerning -his. father, Joseph Robert Willens
Willens was a next-door neighbor of Tony Accardo, prominent Chicago hoodlum. Mr. Willens was interviewed by the Bureau in 1961.

http://mobstersinthenews.blogspot.com/2014/09/mob-linked-river-forest-home-up-for-sale.html
Mob-linked River Forest home up for sale

...From the outside, the house at 935 Franklin Ave. looks like many others you might find in River Forest: A mid-century modern design with a two-car garage and a barbecue pit in the back.
Built in 1952, the three-story home, like many others in the neighborhood, has a touch of Frank Lloyd Wright in the façade. The inside is lined with ornate, hand-milled wood paneling, a lasting touch from the residence’s original owner, a lumberyard owner by the name of Joseph Willens.
And then there’s the underground tunnel in the basement that runs next door, into the one-time home of mob boss Tony “Big Tuna” Accardo.
Well, there might be a tunnel.....

https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/04/the-goldsmith-standard/?searchResultPosition=4
The Goldsmith Standard
BY TOBIN HARSHAW SEPTEMBER 4, 2007 2:25 PMSeptember 4, 2007 2:25 pm
Talk about advance publicity: five days before it hits the newsstands, a profile of the former Justice Department official Jack Goldsmith in The New York Times Magazine is already the talk of the Internet. The author, Jeffrey Rosen, tells of conversations in which Goldsmith “recounted how, from his first weeks on the job, he fought vigorously against an expansive view of executive power championed by officials in the White House.”

“If there’s a villain in Jack Goldsmith’s account of his time in the Justice Department, it’s David Addington, Dick Cheney’s legal alter ego,” reports Spencer Ackerman at TPM Muckraker.

“Addington, who became the vice president’s chief of staff after Scooter Libby resigned following his indictment, served as Cheney’s eyes and ears in the legal battles within the administration over warrantless surveillance, coercive interrogations and indefinite detentions. His style of argument, as recounted by Goldsmith, isn’t exactly a subtle one.”

Lefty bloggers aren’t the only ones impressed. “For those with an interest in the development of legal opinions related to counter-terrorism efforts, including the infamous ‘torture memos,’ the article is a must read,” notes Jonathan Adler, a Case Western Reserve law professor who writes at The Volokh Conspiracy. He continues:

Among other things, it discusses Goldsmith’s decision to withdraw some of the controversial memoranda. Goldsmith apparently withdrew more OLC legal opinions than any of his predecessors, including others related to the “War on Terror.” Goldsmith comes off very well in the article, as well he should. From what I understand of the internal debates on these issues, Goldsmith (and his deputy, Patrick Philbin) remained true to their conservative legal principles while resisting pressure to adopt ends-oriented conclusions in their legal analyses. The Administration could have used more political appointees like them throughout the Justice Department.

One mixed review: Marty Lederman, a Georgetown law professor who, like Goldsmith, served at the Office of Legal Council under President Bush, writes at the Balkinization blog that although he admires most of Goldsmith’s stands, “there are some points on which we disagree.”

One such point is the effect of Jack’s brave December 2003 repudiation of [Justice Department official] John Yoo’s March 2003 opinion. Yoo’s opinion had given a green light to the Pentagon to use “enhanced” interrogation techniques, and to ignore legal constraints such as the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Jack recounts (Rosen’s words) that ‘he could immediately tell the Defense Department to stop relying on the March opinion, since he was confident that it was not needed to justify the 24 interrogation techniques the department was actually using, including two called ‘Fear Up Harsh’ and ‘Pride and Ego Down,’ which were designed to make subjects nervous without crossing the line into coercion.”

Jack is referring here to the 24 techniques listed in Rumsfeld’s April 16, 2003 memo. Had the Pentagon complied with that memo to the letter, we would have largely avoided all of the atrocities that occurred in interrogation rooms in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2003.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/books/review/in-hoffas-shadow-jack-goldsmith.html?searchResultPosition=1
NONFICTION
Made Man: ‘In Hoffa’s Shadow’ Replays a Famous Disappearance

Was Jack Goldsmith’s stepfather, Chuckie O’Brien (center of photo, in a striped shirt), involved in Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance? There was only one way to find out.
Was Jack Goldsmith’s stepfather, Chuckie O’Brien (center of photo, in a striped shirt), involved in Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance? There was only one way to find out.CreditCreditAssociated Press
By Chris Nashawaty  Sept. 27, 2019
IN HOFFA’S SHADOW
A Stepfather, a Disappearance in Detroit, and My Search for the Truth
By Jack Goldsmith

Sometime shortly after 2 p.m. on July 30, 1975, Jimmy Hoffa vanished. The once-formidable labor movement pit bull — who had cozied up to the Mafia in his rise to power, traded televised Punch-and-Judy blows with an ambitious young attorney general named Bobby Kennedy and single-handedly built the International Brotherhood of Teamsters into one of the most politically influential unions in America — was last spotted outside the Machus Red Fox restaurant in the Detroit suburbs. He would never be seen again, dead or alive. He was 62 years old.

In the months leading up to his disappearance, Hoffa, increasingly paranoid, had become embroiled in a dangerous game that most likely sealed his fate. After serving nearly five years of a 13-year sentence in a federal prison for jury tampering, fraud and conspiracy, he emerged as a free man in late 1971, obsessed with taking back control of the union he’d built through bare-knuckle will. In his bid to regain power, he’d bad-mouthed his successor, Frank Fitzsimmons, accusing him of allowing the mob to control the union’s pension fund. He wasn’t wrong, but the accusation was particularly rich coming from a man who regularly swapped favors with the crime families of New York City and the Midwest. The capos who had seen the fruits of doing business with a pushover like Fitzsimmons didn’t take kindly to the headlines Hoffa was making. Plus, there was something about Hoffa’s shoot-from-the-lip accusations that seemed both erratic and careless — as if he’d lost his scalpel-sharp political instincts and developed a death wish while behind bars. On the afternoon of July 30, it appeared that wish was finally granted.

Nearly 45 years after his vanishing act, Hoffa’s infamous fade to black still enthralls, digging its meat hooks into our collective, true-crime-loving psyche. It remains one of the most notorious unsolved mysteries of the 20th century, along with the whereabouts of Amelia Earhart and the identity of the so-called second shooter on the grassy knoll. As such, it has fueled no shortage of theories about where Hoffa’s body ended up: in a vat of boiling zinc in a Detroit fender factory; as alligator food in the Everglades; somewhere beneath the old Giants Stadium in the Meadowlands, a fossil of postwar American criminality.

As for who may have ordered the presumed hit, countless books — ranging from the plausible to the preposterous — have been published about Hoffa’s iconoclastic life. And in Hollywood, where any juicy, stranger-than-fiction yarn is inevitably exploited to death, star-driven dramas ranging from 1992’s “Hoffa” (starring Jack Nicholson in a regrettable putty nose and a gruff, Hoosier-state honk) to Martin Scorsese’s new Netflix epic, “The Irishman” (with Al Pacino as Hoffa), continue to trundle off the celluloid production line.

In other words, it’s fair to say that the last thing the world was itching for in 2019 was another speculative account of Hoffa’s final days. Which is precisely why Jack Goldsmith’s gripping hybrid of personal memoir and forensic procedural lands with the force of a sucker punch. More than just another writer chewing over the same old facts and hypotheses, Goldsmith turns out to have a uniquely intimate connection to the case that gooses him along on his hunt for the truth.....
.....After Hoffa’s disappearance, which was right around the time that O’Brien came into the author’s life, he was fingered as the chief suspect in Hoffa’s murder. For years, the F.B.I. was convinced that O’Brien, the man Goldsmith grew up idolizing, was the person who delivered his boss to his mob-connected killers. The nub of the F.B.I.’s theory was that Hoffa would have only gotten into the car of someone he trusted implicitly. Someone like O’Brien. That dark cloud of suspicion has followed O’Brien ever since. In one of the book’s most chilling sections, Goldsmith recalls being 13 and reading in Newsweek that the man he called “Dad” was being described as a “ne’er-do-well union operative” who the F.B.I. claimed drove Hoffa to a house in Detroit where the former union leader was garroted in a basement. Goldsmith also recalls a childhood incident where he was whisked to the principal’s office after someone called the school and threatened to kidnap the O’Brien children. Good luck falling asleep with sweet dreams after that.

The early chapters of “In Hoffa’s Shadow” tilt toward first-person essay, with the author first describing the tight-lipped, potbellied man who loved him unconditionally, before shifting gears to his eventual estrangement from O’Brien as he pursues a career as a lawman. With no small amount of self-flagellation, Goldsmith confesses that his own selfish careerism made him turn his back on his stepfather. These passages have the bitter regret of a Jim Croce ballad. And their fraught relationship proves to be especially moving as Goldsmith, after becoming a father himself, decides to finally make amends with the aging and ailing O’Brien, vowing to prove his innocence as a sort of unspoken penance.

O’Brien, naturally, is reluctant to be interviewed. But eventually, he relents … to a point. Fearful of being a rat, he answers Goldsmith’s most pointed questions with cryptic Deep Throat hints. He’s nudging his stepson toward the truth without violating the code he grew up with. Goldsmith ends up tilling a lot of ground that will be familiar to Hoffa buffs. But his narrative is bolstered by the rare perspective of O’Brien — someone who was not only on the inside, but who also walked into many rooms during his life expecting to find a plastic tarp on the carpet. Unapologetic criminal behavior pours out of his mouth with a shocking nonchalance.

Goldsmith does manage to pry a few fresh tidbits from his reticent subject: how a re-election-hungry Richard Nixon drafted an airtight agreement to spring Hoffa from prison early in exchange for $1 million in cash and how O’Brien suspects that the New York Mafia boss Anthony Provenzano had a lot to do with Hoffa’s disappearance. But the most addictive chapter comes after the story is over, in an appendix where Goldsmith reconstructs the timelines of Hoffa and O’Brien on July 30, 1975, in granular, minute-by-minute detail.

Some will no doubt regard Goldsmith as an unreliable narrator, but O’Brien, the man in Hoffa’s shadow, comes across as a deeply tragic figure. At every turn, if there’s a bad break to be got, he gets it. He has to be one of the unluckiest saps to ever put on a pinkie ring. Late in life, when O’Brien is frail, defeated, stricken with diabetes and facing mounting debts, his name is finally about to be cleared by the F.B.I. thanks to Goldsmith’s tireless investigative shovel and spadework. To get a letter of exculpation, O’Brien agrees to take a lie-detector test. He passes. But then the bureau’s offer is yanked away like something out of the Tantalus myth, or at least a Charles Schulz comic.

While Goldsmith does convince you of O’Brien’s innocence in the end, he never really does piece together what happened to Hoffa. Some frustrated readers may find this to be better for Goldsmith’s conscience than satisfying. Still, over the course of “In Hoffa’s Shadow,” Goldsmith’s quest becomes less about solving a mystery than a meditation on the complicated and occasionally bittersweet love between fathers and sons. It turns out that sometimes the search for truth can be its own reward.

....Chuckie nonetheless insists there was a payoff. And he says he was the delivery boy.

Chuckie told me that in early December 1971, he received a telephone call in Detroit from Fitzsimmons’s secretary, Annie. “Mr. Fitzsimmons would like to see you,” she said. Chuckie got on the next plane, flew to Washington, and went straight to Hoffa’s former office at the foot of Capitol Hill. After small talk, Fitzsimmons got to the point. “He’s coming home, and it’s going to cost this much,” Fitzsimmons whispered to Chuckie, raising his right index finger to indicate $1 million. “There will be a package here tomorrow that I want you to pick up and deliver.”

The following afternoon, Annie called Chuckie, who was staying at a hotel adjacent to the Teamsters headquarters near the Capitol building. “Mr. Fitzsimmons asked me to tell you that you left your briefcase in his office,” she said. Chuckie had not left anything in Fitzsimmons’s office, but he quickly went there. Fitzsimmons was not around, but Annie pointed Chuckie to a leather litigation bag next to Fitzsimmons’s desk—a “big, heavy old-fashioned briefcase,” as Chuckie described it. Chuckie picked up the bag, and Annie handed him an envelope. Inside the envelope was a piece of paper with “Madison Hotel, 7 p.m.” and a room number written on it.

It was about 5:00 p.m., and Chuckie took the bag to his hotel room. He had delivered dozens of packages during the past two decades, no questions asked, mostly for Hoffa, sometimes for Giacalone, and very occasionally for Fitzsimmons. But this time was different. Chuckie knew of the strain between Fitzsimmons and Hoffa. He wasn’t sure what game Fitzsimmons was playing, especially since Hoffa had not at this point discussed a payoff with him. Chuckie was anxious about what he was getting into. And so he did something he had never done before: he opened the bag.

“I wanted to see what was in the briefcase,” Chuckie told me. “I didn’t trust these motherfuckers. I needed to look; it could have been ten pounds of cocaine in there and the next thing I know a guy is putting a handcuff on me.”

What Chuckie saw was neatly stacked and tightly wrapped piles of one-hundred-dollar bills. He closed the bag without counting the money.

The Madison Hotel, where Chuckie was supposed to deliver the bag, was two miles away, six blocks north of the White House. It “was a very famous hotel” in the early seventies, a place where “political big wheels” and “foreign dignitaries” stayed, Chuckie told me. At about 6:45 p.m., Chuckie took a taxi to the Madison, went to the designated floor, walked to the room (he doesn’t remember the number), and knocked on the door. A man opened the door from darkness. Chuckie stepped in one or two feet. He sensed that the room was a suite, but could not tell for sure.

“Here it is,” Chuckie said, and handed over the bag.

“Thank you,” said the man. Chuckie turned and left. That was it. The whole transaction, from the time he left his hotel to the delivery on the top floor of the Madison, took less than twenty minutes. The actual drop was over in seconds.....

EX-COOK COUNTY CIRCUIT JUDGE JOHN J. CROWN, 67 ...
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1997-03-06-9703060159-story.html
Mar 6, 1997 - John J. Crown, 67, a retired Cook County Circuit Court judge, served on the ... office, he clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark. He was the son of the late Henry Crown, chairman and founder of Material Service Corp....

The Kennedy assassination cover-up‎ - Page 96
Donald Gibson - History - 2000 - 306 pages+


https://www.nytimes.com/1986/12/07/magazine/the-ordeal-of-lester-crown.html?searchResultPosition=1
THE ORDEAL OF LESTER CROWN
BY Bob Tamarkin   Dec. 7, 1986
...The family turned to BrianE. Jenner Jr., a lawyer and longtime friend who is on the board of General Dynamics. ''Whenever the kids got into trouble,'' Jenner says, ''they never bothered the old man. They talked to me, and I got them out of trouble.'' In return for his cooperation with the grand jury, Lester Crown was granted immunity from prosecution....

[Thomas Graves]

. . .

Right, Tom.

Especially since we've clearly and obviously established that a true (but underinformed) Marxist, Lee Harvey Oswald, couldn't possibly have done it, with or without the help of the humanitarian organizations known as the KGB and the DGF.

--  MWT 

[Richard Smith]

Where is the wedding announcement circa 1950 that confirms that Ruth Paine once lived next door to someone who was related to an individual who once was the best man at the wedding of someone who went to school with someone who once knew the son of Allen Dulles?  Thereby somehow proving that Paine was the master spy/suburban housewife behind the assassination of JFK.  I can just imagine old Ruth baking up some brownies while on the phone to J. Edgar plotting the sinister deed.

[Tom Scully]

Where is the wedding announcement circa 1950 that confirms that Ruth Paine once lived next door to someone who was related to an individual who once was the best man at the wedding of someone who went to school with someone who once knew the son of Allen Dulles?  Thereby somehow proving that Paine was the master spy/suburban housewife behind the assassination of JFK.  I can just imagine old Ruth baking up some brownies while on the phone to J. Edgar plotting the sinister deed.

Cliff Notes version: The belief systems of both LNs and CTs are unresponsive to the actual evidence. No one even wants to discuss this entirely reasonable conclusion despite the actual facts. And you certainly do not want to discuss or even evaluate these underpinnings of your own belief system. You are typical and no serious inquiry/evaluation can take place, so any further progress is highly unlikely.

The focus (a diversion) on the TSBD vestibule steps is a result of the unwillingness to consider and address the facts laid out in every post in this young thread, except in yours and MWT's.

In the early 80s, a close friend recently graduated from college interviewed for an entry level position with a major defense contractor.
The interview abruptly ended in response to answering a routine question about family background because the interviewee admitted to having an aunt and uncles residing behind the iron curtain who the interviewee had and would never meet.

Howard Willens's father deliberately moved himself and Howard's mother into the home directly next to the Accardo residence. Earl Warren vacationed with syndicated newspaper columnist Drew Pearson. Pearson was the source for Tom Clark's late 1940s claim that Henry Crown was at least equal to Accardo, yet Tom Clark chose Crown's son, John as his SCOTUS law clerk for the 1956 term and Warren, Tom Clark, and David Acheson pushed Crown's personal attorney, (Al)Bert E Jenner, Jr., on the WC.

Bush selected Chuckie O'Brien's stepson Jack Goldsmith, as key White House legal advisor in 2001. Jim Garrison never admitted to anyone what Shaw himself was informed of....

https://jfkfacts.org/provocative-prolific-joan-mellen/#comment-869223
Tom S.
April 12, 2016 at 1:25 pm
......
https://www.maryferrell.org/pages/Unredacted_-_Episode_1_-_Transcript.html
Unredacted Episode 1: Transcript of Interview with Joan Mellen
Joan Mellen is the author of A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, and the Case That Should Have Changed History. This interview was conducted on 22 Feb 2006. Tyler Weaver provided the introduction, and the interview was conducted by Rex Bradford.
…….
REX: I – I think –

JOAN: – when Baldwin was present, he was a CIA asset, his brother worked for the International Trade Mart and Clay Shaw, David Baldwin, and these, these are CIA people…
.....


From Joan Mellen’s book :

......

IOW, Garrison may have been investigating something, and Clay Shaw may have been a defendant, but neither, when you actually look under the hood, actually acted their part.

Posted by (The late, perceptive) Thomas H. Purvis  July 19, 2013

.....The "power structure" within New Orleans lies not with those who are currently in what is some temporary political position.

It lies with those who possess the capability to place these persons in the various political positions.

Therefore, Jim Garrison, not unlike any other political figure in New Orleans, did what he was instructed to do or else he suffered the consequences....

https://www.nytimes.com/1974/08/29/archives/nixons-new-lawyer-herbert-john-miller-jr-joins-justice-department.html
Nixon's New Lawyer Herbert John Miller Jr.
Aug. 29, 1974
....
....Joins Justice Department

Mr. Millet proved “so marvelous in that rat's nest,” a former colleague said, that when Mr. Kennedy became Attorney General in 1961 he made Mr. Miller the head of the Criminal Division at the Justice Department.

Under Mr. Miller's direction, the division successfully carried on the long and complicated prosecution of James R. Hoffa, head of the teamsters' union. In addition, Mr. Miller initiated the indictment of Robert G. Baker, who was later convicted of income tax evasion, theft and conspiracy to defraud the Government. Mr. Baker had been secretary to the Senate Democratic majority when Lyndon B. Johnson was the majority leader.

As the most visible Republican in the Justice Department in the administrations of Presidents Johnson and Kennedy, Mr. Miller had to endure a good deal of ribbing.

“Once they bought a copy of the Attorney General's book and presented it to him, with my picture pasted above the title, ‘The Enemy Within,’ “Mr. Miller recalled in an interview several years ago. He declined to be interviewed today.

Mr. Miller's colleagues said repeatedly that as a Republican who served in Democratic administrations, he, as one put it, “doesn't come at something from a partisan or ideological point of view.”

“He believes in rigorous law enforcement,” said Howard P. Willens, who was Mr. Miller's deputy at the Justice Department.

“He is known and respected by both sides,” Mr. Moore said. Many who know Mr. Miller attribute this to his cheerful, almost boisterous personality.
.....