Ricky: Russ? Jeff? Oh you are here. It’s so quiet I didn’t know you were here.

Russ: Just minding my own business.

Ricky: Now we’ve got to add Jeff, and I think we’ll be good.

Russ: But adding Jeff was always the problem.

Jeff: Hello.

Ricky: Oh we have Jeff.

Russ: Oh my God speak of the devil.

Ricky: Wow. This took longer than, you know, investigating the JFK assassination.

Jeff: I’m so exhausted by all this that I can barely talk about John F whatever his name is.

Ricky: Russ has been continuing drinking since we’ve been doing that so now he’s really in a bad. Well, I guess we’ll get this going while we still have everybody alive and well. Thanks so much guys for being with me. Like I was telling one of you, during this whole charades that I had quite a few people that I was brainstorming about having on to do this episode. Quite a few of them gave me the same response that I’m not an expert compared to those guys. Sean Stone was one, James Corbett. There was quite a few people who, I was kind of brainstorming with them about, joining us for this conversation. I think that that says a lot about the respect that people have for your years and years of research in this topic.

I’m glad that you guys are willing to do this because even though I’m only 33, I think it’s amazing how many people my age and younger don’t understand how important the JFK assassination is for just a historical event. Also how it paid to so many other things that happened afterwards. I always say, you understand the present much better when you trace the steps backwards and you understand the history that brought you here. I think the JFK assassination is definitely one of those things that help you better understand the present. Thanks again guys. I really appreciate it.

Jeff: Happy to do it.

Ricky: Yeah, thank you, thank you. I think one of the things I was thinking about on how to start the episode is I mean, obviously most people know, is that a clicking of a pen or something that I’m hearing? Are you guys hearing that or is that my, my feed?

Jeff: I hear it. I think it’s just an old fashioned telephone tap.

Russ: Remember I’m on a landline.

Ricky: There’s some people who are going to hear this episode who don’t even know what a landline is. Maybe we’ll start with and I was thinking because of a Russ Baker’s website WhoWhatWhy . That’s one thing we could do is kind of focus on the who and what and why. I’m sure most people are familiar with the official story of November 22nd, 1963, the President of the United States of America, J.F. Kennedy, was shot by a lone assassin. What allegedly was a lone assassin, Oswald, and case closed basically is the way that the Warren commission and many others kind of like to look of this story. Obviously there’s much more to this story and I think, the thing that makes this historical event so fascinating, is that there’s so many layers to it, there’s so many characters. There’s so many different avenues that you can go down and different rabbit holes.

Ricky: I hope to kind of be able to scratch the surface today. Before we get in all that, what made you guys so interested in this story? Why did you, I mean, it’s been a huge part of your life’s work, all three of you are really well known and, and I’ve, I’ve seen multiple interviews, documentaries, so many different pieces of work that focused on your research, on the JFK assassination. What was your motivation? Why focus so much of your life’s work on this specific event? I don’t know who wants to start, but if somebody wants to jump in and kind of share their story. Okay, I’ll pick somebody. Russ, do you want to start with?

Russ: Well, I was going to say let me try to remember why I got involved with this and to some regret, it does kind of swallow you whole. First of all, I want to kind of work backwards and you mentioned our website, WhoWhatWhy . I just want to say that we cover all kinds of issues and we just came off of one of the most intense periods in our history covering the issue of voter suppression. By all or many accounts we’re sort of a leader in that. We did a ton of stories about voter suppression, the topic that has never been covered well by the media. This makes me think about the Kennedy assassination, another topic that’s never been covered well by the media.

They claim to cover it, and by the way, we broke a big story last week, which in a very rare move, almost every major news organization acknowledged us by name, and credited as our reporting with either positive comments or neutral, repeating on what we reported. One website, one so much, small snarky website also used our material, and then made some reference to me and said something like, Baker is aggressively anti-establishment and does not accept the conventional narrative of the Kennedy assassination, which had absolutely nothing to do with voter suppression and the 2018 election. He thought it was helpful. What I found out was that they’re always worried when they quote some other site, what if it backfires?

They were immunizing themselves by citing my work on the Kennedy assassination, as if saying, well, we know that on this issue, this guy may be wrong. What I was fascinated was he thinks that by saying that I don’t accept the establishment interpretation of the Kennedy assassination, that there’s something wrong with me. I love that as a great starting point because in fact, probably most people don’t follow this story. It’s extremely complicated and I’m fairly new. I’ve only been in the Kennedy stuff for, I don’t know what it is, 15 years maybe or something. Jim’s been in it for, I don’t know, 30 years or whatever, so I’m a newbie. Jeff’s probably been in it maybe the since amount or longer than I have, and it’s an extremely complicated story. I came at it you might say almost by accident, I was writing a book about the Bush family.

Became interested in how George W. Bush became president. Then I started looking at his father because he wouldn’t have been president if his father, hadn’t been. As I began looking at his father, I saw these holes in his history, try to fill in some holes, and I became interested in a claim that he couldn’t remember where he was on November 22, 1963 when he heard that Kennedy was shot. I felt well, that’s so odd. I wonder where he was and I did figure out where he was. It turned out he was actually in Dallas and I also found out that he was actually working secretly for the CIA at that time. I thought, well, that’s very interesting. I wonder what he was doing. I wonder what he knows about this and this sent me down this whole sort of rabbit hole.

That’s really through trying to understand the Bushes and their own trajectory into tremendous power in US history, I became interested in the Kennedy assassination, well, what was that? I have to admit like most journalists, I’d never really looked into it. I’d only heard the establishment accounts and I guess I had assumed that Lee Harvey Oswald was this lone assassin, or maybe tied into the Soviet Union or Cuba and that that was the story. For me to begin discovering that what I thought I knew was wrong was really a very, very profound awakening. I think it changed my understanding and my perspective on almost everything. I’m very, very grateful to this experience, and all the people who’ve spent their lives sort of trying to open this information up in helping me see dynamics of power in this country in a whole new way.

Ricky: Thank you. Anybody else who wants to go next? Jim, you want to share your story?

Jim: Well, when Russ said he’s only been doing this for 15 years, in any other field, he’s a veteran in his field, in this kind of field he’s not. That’s actually right the way he’s stated that. Because one of the things you have to understand about the Kennedy assassination is that, there’s so much disinformation out there on this case. Some of it’s deliberate, some of it’s by accident. The way I got into this is that I discovered belatedly, Jim Garrison’s interview in playboy, which if you recall, if you were old enough and I was old enough. Garrison was supposed to be this madman, this quack, etc. So many people, even some people inside the JFK community, took that portrait of him. I read that interview belatedly a few years after about 10 years after it was published.

I said, geez, this guy makes a hell of a lot more sense than the Warren commission does. I began to look into this, and so when I graduated from film school, my friend asked me you got any ideas about writing a screenplay? I said, well, want to do the Kennedy assassination? He goes, well, how are you going to do it? I said to me, there’s only one way you can do a movie about the Kennedy assassination and that should be this Jim Garrison guy. I started to write a treatment and then one day I woke up and I saw in variety that Oliver Stone had bought the rights to his book. Then to salvage all the work I put into that, I put out the first edition of my book, Destiny Betrayed . Then one thing led to another that was about ‘91, I think. I sort of fell down as they say the rabbit hole, and I’ve been there ever since. Okay. That’s how I got interested in it.

Jeff: Rick, let me place myself… I fall between Russ and, and Jim. For me the turning point was after Oliver Stone made his movie, and Congress was shamed into passing the law, releasing all of the JFK file. I had just started working at the Washington Post in 1992, and inside the Post , people were normally critical of people who were open minded and wanted to see the evidence. It was amazing to see, on this one question, that they did not want to know anything. They just wanted to denounce Oliver Stone. I was sort of interested in the assassination at this point, more in kind of a cultural way. How the assassination was reflected in movies and books? I was sort of agnostic or like Russ, I sort of figured, well the official story must be kind of true.

When that law passed in 1992 and the government was supposed to release all its JFK records, I realized that this subject, which was 30 years old at that point, there was actually going to be new information. It wasn’t a matter of going back and revisiting what had been written by various conspiracy theorists or by the government between 1963 and 1992. There was going to be all this new information and I thought and I was quite certain in fact, having covered the CIA a little bit, that there would be interesting material in here, regardless of whether it solved the assassination or not. This was going to be a chance to really look at how the government responded to this terrible crisis and terrible event. As documentation started to come into the National Archives in 1993 and ‘94, I went there to look for stories.

I quickly realized that the whole story of the CIA and Oswald had been covered up, obfuscated, lied about. In fact, what the CIA had portrayed as really minimal interest or as they said, “routine” interest in Oswald before the assassination was complete fiction, it was a cover story. The CIA was deeply interested in Oswald for four years before he supposedly killed the president. When I realized that truth, that fact, and it’s not really open to any dispute now, I realized this was a story I wanted to go get. That’s how I started into it in 1992.

Ricky: Great. Let’s start with, like I said, maybe we’ll do the what, the who, the why, because I think that order makes the most sense. Most people are familiar with the Zapruder film. I mean it’s crazy that such a historical event there’s actually a film out there that shows, I guess, if that’s questionable, how much they show and if it’s been tampered with, if it’s been edited or whatnot. People have been to Dallas, they’ve seen the building where supposedly the shots were taken. They’ve seen the grassy knoll, they’ve seen all the stuff. When it comes down to the actual day before we get into the characters and stuff like that, do you guys think that there’s any real, what’s the most, I guess, convincing piece of evidence that the official story is wrong? Anybody want to jump in?

Jim: Do you want to start with the Russ again?

Ricky: Yeah, we can start with Russ. We’ll get to keep the same…

Russ: No, no, don’t start with me every time. Come on, that’s too steep a hill to climb.

Jim: Geez thanks Russ. The thing that I believe today is the strongest piece of evidence against the official story is the new revelations about CE399. Okay if your listeners don’t know, CE399 is the so-called magic bullet. This was the bullet that was supposed to have gone through both Kennedy and Connolly and then ended up on somebody’s stretcher, not really sure at parkland hospital. It was recovered by the security officer there and then turned over to the secret service. The Warren commission said that this bullet did all these things and it ended up being a pretty much intact artifact and you can actually see it in the Warren commission volumes. There’s been a lot of new work done on CE3998 by Tink Thompson and Gary Aguilar and a guy named John Hunt, who went down to the archives and did a lot of research on it.

These raised the most very, I believe, damaging suspicions about what really happened that day. Tink Thompson in his classic book back in 1967, Six Seconds in Dallas , showed a picture of CE399 to the guy who turned it over to the Secret Service, and he said, that’s, that’s not the bullet that I turned over. Because Tink had shown him a copper coated round nose jacketed bullet and he guy said, no it was a kind of lead colored pointed bullet. It turns out that Gary Aguilar and Tink Thompson’s found the FBI agent who was supposed to show that the bullet to these guys at Parkland. At least that’s what it says in the FBI report. They showed him the report he goes, no, I never did such a thing. I would have remembered it because I know that guy, that the report says that I showed the bullet too. I didn’t do it. His name is Bardwell Odom.

Then John Hunt found out that another exhibit says that the Secret Service agent who gave the bullet, a guy named Elmer Lee Todd to the FBI carved his initials in the base of the bullet. Well John Hunt went down there and they gave him these blown up pictures of the whole 360 degree circumference plus the base and the tip of the bullet. He says Elmer Lee Todd initials are not on this bullet anywhere. All right. The final thing he found out is that although Elmer Lee Todd got the bullet at the White House and delivered the bullet to the FBI around 9:20, it turns out that Frazier, the FBI technician says he had the stretcher bullet at 7:30. Which to put it in a nutshell, it suggests either the bullet was substituted, or there was an extra bullet. That’s, I think, pretty powerful evidence against the official story.

Ricky: Jeff, do you …?

Jeff: What was your question, Ricky?

Ricky: Well, basically I wanted to start with, before we go down the rabbit holes of the characters and stuff like that, I think people are most familiar with the very famous Zapruder film and I guess maybe start with the forensic evidence of that day. Was there anything about the official story, the fact that the shot came from the building from Oswald from his gun? What part of that story do you think makes the least sense and, and you think is the best piece of evidence that the official story is incorrect?

Jeff: Well, I try not to rely on one piece of evidence to decide anything that seems sort of short sided. If you take the context of the gunfire, both the forensic evidence and the statements of the people who were closest to the gunfire, and you match it up against the official theory, it doesn’t match up at all. You have seven bullet wounds in Kennedy and Connolly: in Kennedy’s head, the fatal shot; in Kennedy’s back; in his throat; in Connolly’s back; in Connolly’s chest; in Connolly’s arm; and through Connolly’s arm and into Connolly’s leg. You have a dent in the front of the limousine, and you have a missed shot that strikes a sidewalk down the street and slightly injures a bystander. The idea that three bullets caused all of that damage, it’s extremely implausible.

Then when you match that with the visual evidence on the Zapruder film, it doesn’t match up. Then if you take the witness statements of all the people who were in the car and closest to the car: Jackie Kennedy, Nelly Connolly, John Connolly. Basically, none of them believed what the Warren commission said. Connolly was quite certain that one bullet hit Kennedy in the back and the second bullet hit him in the back. His wife Nelly agreed. Well, if they’re right, the Warren commission is wrong. These were the Connollys were experienced hunters. They knew their way around guns and gun fire. Roy Kellerman, the secret service man did not agree with that. He thought the shot came from the front.

For me, a very important moment was when I interviewed Bill Newman, who was one of the bystanders who was closest to the motorcade when the fatal shots hit. He said that he had the distinct impression that a bullet came over his head, which is why you see him lying on the grass in photographs after the gunfire ran out. Well, a gunshot from the book depository did not go over his head. He was on the far side of the limousine at that point. All of that evidence together combined with the fact that when you read the Warren commission, you can see FBI agents studiously avoiding ever even raising the possible ability of a shot from the front. Bill Newman was not interviewed for the Warren commission. His testimony was ignored.

You see that the people who constructed the Warren commission and the narrative of three bullets striking the president from behind and one bullet causing certain wounds in Connolly and Kennedy, it just doesn’t match with the evidence. It was concocted some other way besides looking at the evidence. That tells you right there that something’s not right about the story. The story can’t be right because the evidence does not support it.

Ricky: Russ?

Russ: Well, I think all of those points are excellent ones. Just to underline the fact that there is not a single fact that really, either needs to be the determining factor in certain showing that the official narrative is not correct. In any case, I’ll choose something else just for the sake of fun here, and I’ll say that Oswald himself, apparently a bad shot wasn’t using a particularly good gun with a particularly good scope. Very, very difficult shot from that particular spot. Lots of good shots all around, good angles but not his. Then a tree in the way then the fact that by most accounts he doesn’t seem to have even been on the sixth floor at that time. Then the fact that the sheriffs that got to the scene first described a completely different gun than Oswald’s gun. I think those things are very persuasive again that there were problems with the story.

The larger issue here is that I think the reason that the community of researchers who worked so diligently on this, have had trouble persuading people, is precisely because there are so many facts that suggest that the official narrative is not right. You can take almost anything. You can take Oswald himself. What would his motive had been if he was not working for someone of these agencies? If he was in fact a sympathizer with Cuba or something, why would he have done that? They were never able to determine a valid motive. I think if you take all these things and there are literally hundreds and hundreds of other factors that don’t really make sense. Plus these tremendous narratives that we’ve all done in our book. In my book, Family of Secrets , I focused on the Texas school book depository company, the employer of Lee Oswald.

The whole story of how and why they hired him and put him into that building, there is no benign interpretation of that. If you look at who those people were who owned and ran that company, and who their allies were and their politics and everything else except to say that they deliberately hired this man to make sure that he was in the building at that time. Then of course he gets framed immediately or at least blamed, let’s say, for the shooting despite all the indications that it wasn’t him. You have to say, well, what’s that whole narrative about that? That’s not a man acting on his own, obviously.

Ricky: Yeah. There’s a lot of people who believe, obviously Oswald was working with the FBI or CIA and he was even sent to Soviet Union to hopefully be recruited by the Soviets, you know, picking up. I’ve heard that theory. There’s a lot of, there’s so many things. It’s hard to pick a spot where to go from here. Would you guys prefer going into the who or the why? Do you think it’s more important to understand first the historical reasons to why people might want to take him out? Obviously Vietnam and all the other things, or what do you guys think?

Jeff: Yeah, I mean, look, the president of the United States is not supposed to get shot in broad daylight, so we obviously have a catastrophic intelligence failure. What was the cause of that? How was it possible that the president’s security could fail so completely, and why would somebody … When that happens, the most obvious explanation is that it’s a political crime, right? That somebody opposed the president’s policy and was seeking to end his presidency. Well, if you look at the government at that time, there were powerful factions that had opposed Kennedy, whose leaders were personally extremely angry and fearful of Kennedy’s policies. Especially more so in Cuba than any other country. More so in Cuba and Vietnam certainly. These were men who spoke with the Kennedy brothers with contempt. They hated and feared their liberal policies.

The most likely place to look for somebody who would want to end the Kennedy presidency is in those sectors that opposed his policies most vehemently, and that’s the CIA and the pentagon. That’s the most plausible explanation of why somebody would have wanted to kill the president. If you go down and you look at that, you have a dozen senior CIA officers who fall into one of three categories: either they knew about Oswald and his biography and were well acquainted with it while Kennedy was still alive; they were involved in the assassination operations for the CIA assassination of other foreign leaders; or they implicated themselves in the crime later. If you look at the universe of CIA officers who fit into that, there’s a dozen who fit into one of those three categories.

Those, to me are the most likely suspects for the people who organized the assassination. Because we know that they had the knowledge of the accused assassin, they had knowledge of assassination operations, or they implicated themselves in the crime. That’s where we start in terms of thinking about who might’ve been responsible.

Russ: This is Russ, I just wanted to add to …

Ricky: Hold on Russ one second, Jim, are you still on the line?

Jim: Yeah. I’m still here.

Ricky: Just making sure. I didn’t see… I see Jeff’s face and I see Russ’s face and I didn’t see anything indicating that you are still on.

Jim: Yeah I’m still here. You want me to go, I’ll go.

Ricky: No, I just wanted to make sure we didn’t lose you okay. Sorry, Russ continue, I’m sorry.

Russ: I was just wanting to agree with Jeff and to underline the ramifications of what he’s saying. Because what he just said is both true and extremely disturbing. It even makes me uncomfortable and I agree with all this. It’s so disturbing that the human reaction is to lash out at the messenger. That statement, that the establishment of our own country, the leadership, the security forces that are supposed to be protecting democracy could possibly do something that is, is basically completely unacceptable. I think this gets to the core of why the establishment, and I’m talking about the media, academia, textbook publishers, everyone, they absolutely refused to even talk about any of this.

That’s why they’ve always coined terms like conspiracy theorists to just kind of throw people off from even discussing the evidence and stuff, because it’s so profoundly nauseating, physically nauseating to even contemplate. Because we’re always told from an early age, the propaganda, I think, is very intense about how wonderful our country is, and that basically America, right or wrong, all the great things that we’ve done. Of course America has done plenty of great things, but it’s done plenty of awful things. That part of it is covered a little bit in the media here and there, but it’s always sort of remote events, a long time ago, whatever. The idea that the leadership or the core of the country is capable of a kind of a monstrously antidemocratic act, violent act like that.

The same kind of thing that we condemn in all these other countries and call them, tinhorn dictatorships and banana republics, that we actually in some ways don’t behave any better and in fact of course that our own country has had a long history of fostering that kind of behavior in all these countries, where we had a lot of influence and an agenda. I think this gets at the core of why this is such a difficult topic and people just want to shut it all out.

Ricky: I think one of the scariest things is when you really start dissecting this and realize what actually possibly happened that day. It makes you wonder about the possibilities, the fact that like if this could happen, then what, has it stopped to or who’s really controlling the government, who’s really controlling politics, who’s really pulling the strings, and it really makes you think that anything’s possible. Jim, would you like to add to that? What Russ and Jeff have talked about?

Jim: Sure. One of the things that you learn if you’ve been on this case as long as I have, is that you really start to look into what’s the real power structure or what was it at least in 1963? Right? One of the things like Jeff just mentioned, and I think there’s an aspect of the book that I’m Russ wrote, is that, there’s a connection between these agencies of government at least at the higher level and what the power structure the united … What some people call the power elite, you know, and by about the end of as John Newman says by the end of 1962, all these people were kind of opposed to Kennedy. They really didn’t like some of the things that he was doing. He had a perfect opportunity to go ahead and bomb missile sites in Cuba. Nobody would have said a word about it because the Russians already had moved their missiles in there.

He didn’t do it, and in fact, he was going for a kind of backdoor rapprochement with Castro. One of the things that you learn from reading these documents, whether A or B, there was nobody more sad about Kennedy’s assassination than Khrushchev and Castro were. There was nobody more upset than those guys were. When Khrushchev went to pay his respects, at the American embassy, he was crying when he signed his name there. Castro just couldn’t believe it, and he predicted that they would try and blame it on him. What you try and look for is, if you blow out the Oswald story, which I think is what you were doing with the first round of questions, you’re trying to find who was opposed to Kennedy and who was in a position to actually be a part of this.

I think some of the suspects were, as Jeff mentioned, were the upper level of the CIA and some of the people in the pentagon. I think at the top level, who I believe had some kind of sanction over it, were probably the upper power structure of the United States in 1963. People don’t understand how, where Kennedy was actually going, ‘62 and ‘63. How many of you … we talk about Vietnam and Cuba, but Kennedy had a different foreign policy also in the third world with the colossal Congo crisis that went on for three years. He was also trying to change things in the Middle East. He was trying to separate himself, see the Dulles brothers kind of liked Saudi Arabia, and Nixon liked the shah of Iran. Kennedy didn’t like those guys at all and he was trying to actually get a kind of alliance together with Gamel Abdel Nasser of Egypt.

He wanted to be very fair handed in that region of the country, of the world, and he didn’t want to favor either side. This kind of brought him into a conflict with Israel. The whole panoply of issues, I even left out Indonesia, because there was a huge blow out on that, after reversal of Kennedy’s policies. This is one of the things I’ve been working on in the last few years, is an area which I don’t think has been explored, that now, is Kennedy’s foreign policy outside Vietnam and Cuba.

Jeff: I would add to what Russ and Jim are saying is the sense that Kennedy was isolated within his own government, and especially in the national security council in the national security realm. We talk about the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy forced a peaceful resolution then, but he was in the distinct minority of the 20 men who were really in on the final conversations about what the US government should do. A solid majority of those men favored the immediate going to war, which Kennedy resisted successfully. It was a minority viewpoint within the debate of insiders. Kennedy was in that sense a minority in his own government, and this contributed to the anger of his foes.

That he was able to prevail and able to change the direction of US government policy, when in fact most of the national security decision makers around him certainly in the CIA and pentagon were totally opposed to what he was doing. You have another reason why there was, why there might have been a motive to assassinate him. I would say that by the way, this does not require dozens and dozens of men getting together and saying, let’s have a plan to kill the president and let’s execute it. That’s not the way covert operations work. Covert operations are highly compartmentalized. I think there were lots of people in the senior positions of the pentagon and the military who did not know there was a plot to kill Kennedy.

When Kennedy was killed they understood instantly what happened, and they simply chose not to investigate because the results were just fine with them. Kennedy had been removed as the president. Johnson had succeeded and there was no longer a problem with Kennedy’s liberal policies. The proof of this, where you can see it quite clearly is, the CIA and the Warren commission and the FBI never investigated, never even tried to investigate the possibility that the assassination was the work of Castro. I don’t think that it was, but from an investigative point of view, that is certainly something that you would have wanted to investigate because Oswald had some pro- Castro sympathies in his background and pro-Castro actions. Castro had a motive because this guy was trying to assassinate him at the time.

The Warren commission never established a motive, so why wasn’t Cuba investigated? Well, Cuba wasn’t investigated for a very simple reason. If you had investigated Oswald’s connections with Cuba, you would have learned that Oswald’s connections with the CIA were much, much greater than his connections with Cuba. That was not a story that the CIA was going to let, allow to get out. It’s only since the release of the JFK files in 1992, that we’ve really begun to understand the relationship of the CIA to Oswald before Kennedy was killed.

I think he just mentioned there about compartmentalization. See if you take a look the investigation or rather lack of investigation into what was going on in Mexico City. There’s that famous marginalia, a piece of writing that J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI said, “let’s not trust the CIA on this.” They sold us out snow job about Oswald in Mexico City. Of course the Mexico City thing was before the assassination, so six weeks after the assassination, Hoover is still trying to figure out what the heck was going on, you know. This is one indication that you didn’t have to have everybody in on it.

Jim: No, absolutely. The other thing is that the president United States gets shot dead in broad daylight. It’s a terrible, terrible security and intelligence failure, and you know what, nobody at the CIA or the FBI even loses their job. Now Hoover did reprimand 18 different FBI agents. The reason he did that was he wanted to inoculate the FBI from the CIA, and he wanted to show that he had taken seriously, that people had failed to identify Oswald as a threat to the president. Which under the security criteria of the day, they should have been all over him and they weren’t, and that’s why Hoover was distancing himself from the CIA, because the CIA story about Oswald was a cover story. Hoover understood that on day one.

Ricky: Russ do you want to add to that?

Russ: Wow there’s so much here. The whole issue about Hoover becomes very, very complicated, because the activities of the bureau and particularly his local guy in Dallas, Mr. Hosty, interacting with Oswald. The story that he destroyed his notes and so forth. This is all gets into this issue of whether whoever planned this thing was really able to essentially sort of piggyback, and that’s one of my favorite themes. The ability to identify all of the things that were already in motion. For example, there was the FBI’s, monitoring of Oswald. There were all these different things going on, the very fact that they may have already been running Oswald for years as a person who even before he went to Russia infiltrating leftist groups, infiltrating Cuban groups and so on.

There was so much stickiness on this into all of these entities. I think that at a minimum they would have known that the instinct of anyone would have been self-preservation, and that is to cover up, and I think that even extended to Robert Kennedy himself. Because some of the things he did, some of the people he associated with, it was so difficult to try to explain why you did what you did, and what actions you took or didn’t [take]. People you knew. how, and why you knew them? Everything was just like fly paper, you know, it just stuck to everybody. I think that that was the brilliance of this plan, that there was a certain kind of inherent simplicity to it, which is understanding that so many institutions and individuals had their fingerprints on this stuff.

These right wing oil people who very likely were not involved explicitly in the plot, people who were very outspoken in saying that Kennedy had to go. Essentially implying that they would be okay if somebody took a shot at him. All of this was already out there just sitting there to be exploited. It was really impossible for anybody to explain all of this stuff away. It was really in nobody’s interest to say, let’s get to the bottom of this. I also want to say, because I do run a news organization, and we do specialize in complexity and trying to look at stories and say, there’s more to this folks. It’s very difficult to do that sort of work because people have difficulty with complexity. They have difficulty with long elaborate accounts of things, and they’re always looking for the simplest explanation. I think this is why this explanation, well it was just this one guy and he did it and that’s the end of the story was very, very appealing.

Ricky: I agree. I think sometimes people just … the simple story is just easier to digest. I think once you get into all the layers and all the possible players into the whole assassination, it can be a little overwhelming. I mean even myself well just kind of reconnecting with the story and doing some of my own research just to make sure I didn’t miss anything. Any possible questions I might want to bring up. I forgot how many layers and how many characters and everything from the mob, CIA, FBI, Oswald, Jack Ruby. There are just so many different rabbit holes you can go down that it does seem overwhelming. From an outsider’s perspective, sometimes it’s easier to just think Oswald did it. Start off with like for example, the secret service, we briefly touched on it. I had Abraham Boldenn, which obviously you guys are familiar with.

I had him on years ago and he talked about how a lot of the secret service agents weren’t fans of JFK. A lot of them, you know, were very happy to see him go, and said it even prior to the assassination they would have been a happy not to jump in front of a bullet for him. Obviously there’s a video before they take the last turn of secret service agents being asked to get away from the vehicle and shrugging afterwards. Do you think they were just actively involved? Do you think that they were a part of planning it or do you think they just, it was one of those things where they just let it happen?

Jeff: I do not think the secret service was involved.

Ricky: Jeff: No. Do you guys agree with that… Period.

Russ: Well, in my opinion, you can sure as heck make a good case for negligence. Even the Warren commission knew that, I think, there was six of them at that after hours club, The Cellar, in Dallas until three or four o’clock in the morning, getting bombed. That club just sold high level log pain alcohol. What did they do? They hired some firemen to guard JFK’s suite until they got back. Some people say, maybe that’s why the reaction time was so bad. As far as I can see it’s only Clint Hill actually trying to do something positive to protect it. It was a very, very, very below par performance, I think by those guys.

Jeff: I think that’s right, negligence is the right word.

Jim: One thing I’d have to say about that is if we agree that this was a coup d’état and that this whole thing was planned, then obviously the planners at least didn’t leave it to chance that the Secret Service would not foil the plot. Then you have to consider what was the plan for the Secret Service? Were they just going to just ignore them and just assumed they were incompetent or something? I think there was some deliberate effort to make these things happen, including the fact that they ended up at The Cellar. I’ve done a lot of research on that, which I haven’t reported, if I ever get my Kennedy book done, I’ll have a lot on all of that, but you see a guiding hand there. How that worked exactly? I agree entirely what Jeff said about the compartmentalization. Certainly there would have been a very limited circle of people who knew much of anything, but I think an awful lot of people were steered. They were moved like pawns.

When you’ve got people who already, as my colleagues here said, were predisposed against Kennedy… perfectly okay if something bad happens to him, aware that Dallas was a … because of many things, including the full page ads in the newspaper, calling him out and so forth. They knew they were in a bad situation there and the way they behaved, you have to ascribe tremendous negligence and tremendous incompetence to them for all of these things to have gone wrong. The choice of the route, the failure to have sharp shooters on these bridges and everywhere and windows. All of these things are beyond, to me, they’re beyond incompetence. I’m not saying that members of the Secret Service were involved necessarily in planning this, but I think on some level there was at a high level, at least there was a conscious effort.

I do think that one has to take a close look at the boss of the Secret Service to the boss of the boss, in terms of their relationships. The head of the, the parent agency, the treasury, and his very close relationship with the … family, his business interests, and so forth. I think you did need something there. Of course I don’t know if we have time to get into here, but all these things, these purported security drills that they may have told people that they were doing. Maybe telling them that Kennedy didn’t want the protection around the car, another falsehood. Were they told that very inconsistent stories, the Secret Service men themselves told in various hearings from the Warren commission to the house select committee on assassinations to the assassination records review board and on and on. Books they’ve published since then.

There’s so many things there raising questions about who knew what and why they behaved the way that they did. I don’t want to give them any kind of a pass at all. In fact, I think the Secret Service has a pretty bad history overall. At WhoWhatWhy , we’ve done a whole bunch of stories about them. Just incredible, the behavior around Obama and the ability of people to get into the White House or close to the White House, fire shots, and then not be held. I mean, just astonishing throughout their entire history. If they’ve always been this incompetent then, what does that say about our country and about our priorities?

Ricky: Do you guys, I’m sure you guys have seen the video of the Secret Service agent being asked to get away from the car as you see on the video, those handles on the back of Kennedy’s car where Secret Service agents can kind of be a body shield. Do you think there’s anything to that? Purposely being asked and the fact that there wasn’t a bubble on the car, and I know that was kind of not regular to not have some type of shield or something around the president. He had prior parades and stuff like that where he had kind of a bubble that looked like glass, some type Plexiglas over the car. Also the fact that it looked like the car never sped up until after the fatal gunshot that it had. Do you think there’s anything to any of those theories that, that was all on purpose?

Jim: Nobody has ever gotten to the bottom as to exactly why. There’s even a debate as to who that guy is. For a long time people thought it was a guy named Rybka but it turns out that that’s not him, it’s a different guy. Nobody’s ever gotten to the bottom of why he was called off. I’ve never seen any satisfactory explanation. That goes to another point here, the reason there’s people like us is because the official investigations have been so bad. When you combine the Warren commission, which by the way never had one open hearing except for the two that Mark Lane insisted on. The only two that were open was done completely in secret. Then they issued 26 volumes of evidence and Allen Dulles says nobody’s going to read anything anyway. Well, thank God there were a few people who did.

Then you have the house select committee on assassinations, which I think most of us would agree was not again, not a satisfactory investigation. Then we finally get Oliver Stone with this movie, JFK, and he finally gets all these documents declassified, although everybody thought most of them were declassified in 1998. It turns out that there were literally tens of thousands of pages that were not declassified in 1998 when the ARRB closed down. To this day the Trump administration is still holding back several thousand pages of documents. It falls to people like us to try and investigate, as my two colleagues have said is a very, very complex case. No I don’t have an answer to that question, I wish I did.

Ricky: Russ?

Russ: Sorry, what was the question again?

Jim: Why was that guy called off the car outside of Love Field?

Russ: I agree with Jim, I don’t think that’s settled. By the way, speaking of settled, talk about when it gets unsettling, is that these things aren’t resolved. I mean, how many people are in pictures? There’s this fellow standing in front of the building. Some people think its George H.W. Bush, I have my doubts about it when you look at the hairline and so forth. Although again I mean one of the techniques of intelligence agencies is to slightly alter people’s appearances through wigs and all sorts of other things. It fascinates me that nobody ever comes forward to say, “Oh I know who that is,” anybody credible. It seems sort of ridiculous with the crime of the century, if not of the entire history of the United States that people cannot say, “oh that’s so and so, or that was my husband or that was me.”

It’s just as amazing to me, and this is one of the reasons that the Kennedy case itself is considered by many sort of criminologists people who study these. One of the most fantastic unsolved cases ever because of the huge number of improbabilities anyway you look at this. Even just that, you know, you have cases all the time, minor cases, somebody comes forward and says, oh that’s so and so, or here’s the matching picture and we don’t get it on this thing. Again and again and again, we don’t get these things resolved. There’s so much work, I’m not saying this could never be done, but there’s so much work that would have to be done to clear all these things up. I don’t know the story there, but I will say this if you watch that video, I think it’s very, very hard to assign any kind of benign motives, whether telling this guy to get off the car and he’s objecting.

Now you could say that is superior or whatever was waving him off was told Kennedy again, as I said earlier, Kennedy doesn’t want you guys on the car. He wants to show that he’s not afraid of Dallas maybe, and again, as far as the bubble top, I mean, it wasn’t bulletproof, but it’s quite likely could have made it more difficult for those shots to get in there. Then that’s a complicated story because of the claim that Kennedy himself wanted the top off the car, so you get into it. I think those of us who spent years on this, the challenge is it takes so much time to evaluate every one of these pieces and resolve it, and of course, within the community of people who follow this stuff, there’s endless debate about all this stuff.

Ricky: Also we briefly kind of hit on motive by talking about Vietnam and Jim talked about some of his foreign policy and stuff, I mean somebody else who also had motive was Allen Dulles who was fired after the Bay of Pigs, and was coincidentally added to the Warren commission to investigate the guy who fired him, the death of the guy who fired them. How involved, I’ll talk to Jeff about this because I know Jeff has done a lot of research on the CIA, how involved do you think the CIA was in the whole assassination?

Jeff: Okay. When you say the CIA …

Ricky: Well, Allen Dulles specifically.

Jeff: We need to speak more specifically. I don’t believe Allen Dulles was involved with foreknowledge of a plot to kill Kennedy. I think he understood instantly what had happened and he sought to protect the agency. I say that because I don’t see any evidence that he had foreknowledge. Could he have? It’s possible, but I see no need to speculate. I prefer to focus on the officers, like I said, who had knowledge of Oswald, who participated in assassination operations, or who implicated themselves in the crime. We don’t need to speculate further beyond that. The facts of those dozen officers are well established, so that’s where we should focus our attention. Not on people where our comments can only be speculative.

Ricky: Do you guys agree? Do you think there was a lack of evidence that Allen Dulles was directly involved?

Jim: Well, first it was no coincidence he was on the Warren commission as David Talbot’s book establishes he, as far as I know, he was the only guy who actually lobbied to be on that commission. Nobody else I know actually wanted to be on it. The thing that’s troubling about Dulles once he got on the Warren commission, is that because he was the only guy who didn’t have a day job, he was the single most active person on the Warren commission. A guy named Walt Brown has produced these matrixes about who was at so many meetings, how long they stayed, et cetera. Well, the single most active person that he has designated is Allen Dulles. In close second, I think it’s almost a tie, were John McCoy and Jerry Ford.

For all intents and purposes, after doing a lot of work on this, I think it’s pretty clear that those three men actually pretty much controlled what the Warren commission was doing and where they were headed. Then of course there’s that, the incredible I don’t know if you ever talked about this on your show, the incredible last executive session in which the guys who were not part of that, the nexus that is Richard Russell, Hill Boggs, and John Sherman Cooper came to the last meeting ready to make their objections heard, particularly about the single bullet theory. That group of people, which I call like the southern wing because they were all from the south. They had real doubts about this case from the beginning and they did not at all buy Marina Oswald as a witness.

In fact they went down to Dallas and did a special hearing with her and if you ever read that colloquially, you’ll see just how divergent they were. I think that was by August from the guys who were running the investigation and they came in and they were going to make their objections. They were going to put them on the record. They started in with this and it turns out that there was a person in there who was, they had made out to be the stenographer, except the stenography company had been terminated about a week before. So whoever that person was, was not an official stenographer from the stenography company. That person went ahead and made like they were doing the stenographic record getting all of Russell’s and Cooper’s and Boggs’s objectives into the record. Except there was no record.

There is no stenographic record of that last meeting. When Richard Russell found out about this, he became the first guy to really go after, I think that was in ‘67, who really began to go after the Warren commission. He was livid that he had been duped like this. The whole idea, and this is one of the reasons I liked that so much, the whole idea that the Warren commission was a unanimous verdict is not really true. They only did it by subterfuge and, in fact, Russell did his own investigation. Not very many people know that, but that’s why he wasn’t at too many meetings because he was doing his own investigation.

Russ: Ricky: That’s a very good point. Russ? Do you want to add to that Russ or…?

Russ: Yeah. Going back well, first of all, this is fascinating Jim, and I’d love to hear more about that. I love the fact that all these very bright, capable people are taking pieces of this. It’s sort of extraordinary to see. It’s the best of a kind of a crowdsourced investigation just that you never see really. I wish we could see this on more things that are happening today, but anyway, very, very interesting and I’m always learning from these guys. Anyway, my thought is, I’ll say this, I agree with Jeff, and I think he’s always very, very careful in how he frames these things and he’s got this very interesting lawsuit seeking to pry open the files, get information for the agency. I think he has that approach which I think is very, very wise. I play a little bit of a different role.

I’m piecing together for my eventual book, if it ever comes out, thousands and thousands of little data points, on a broad range of things, not specializing so much. Looking for patterns, trying to, if you will, kind of put a giant jigsaw puzzle together. I agree with Jim that, first of all, it’s very significant Allen Dulles’s role on the commission. I think that at a minimum we can say that yes, to Jeff’s point, he at least instantly saw what happened and was very, very willing to helm the effort to steer the report and the public opinion in a certain direction. I don’t understand how and why he does that without some kind of awareness of what was going on. Obviously I think it’s safe to say he supported what happened. He was after all the chairman of the board of the US coup and murder apparatus that did exactly this kind of thing.

This was what he did. This is what he liked to do. This is what he was good at. All these people that we know were involved, were long-time friends of his, so you’d have to ask yourself why they would exclude him. This man who had such a strong motive, to see Kennedy out, why they would exclude him? Maybe as one said, compartmentalization that need to know. Maybe he didn’t want to know too many details. I think to put something of this magnitude together and figure it all out, I think you needed to have him on board to some extent, probably would have been hard to do it without him. If you had these lower level people, Harvey and some of these others Phillips and so forth, I think it would be hard to kind of get all these folks together to work together on something this sensitive without knowing that Uncle Allen had approved it.

The specifics of how that worked I think is certainly opened to dispute, but logically I would imagine that they would have had to have agreement and certainly I think you couldn’t have done this with just those low level people. You would have had somebody at a high level who could have brought some kind of consensus from the key, most powerful people in the most powerful sectors of the country, that this would be okay. We haven’t talked about the military. I’ve spent the last year focusing my research mostly on the military and I think absolutely, there had to be some kind of agreement from the military at the highest levels for this coup to take place. I don’t know how you do that without involving Dulles.

Jeff: I think it’s fair to, think that there was a nod from on high that whoever put this together had some signal that, there would be no objection and they could count on the protection of the national security apparatus. I guess I would say in terms of Dulles, I think that the nod from the top might well have come from the military side, not from the CIA side. I just think, while that’s very plausible, I don’t think we can point to any one person who that necessarily, giving that not who that would have been.

Ricky: Now, for people who are listening, who aren’t familiar with, we haven’t got too much into Jack Ruby and there’s some links between Jack Ruby and Oswald, and the fact that they actually knew each other even though they, they said that he was just somebody who loved Kennedy and killed Oswald because of that. Jack Ruby had links, obviously links to the mob, owned a club, all this stuff. He had a video after being arrested after shooting Oswald saying that this goes to the highest levels and that. Who do you guys think he’s referring to? Did you think? If it’s not, Jeff, for example, if you don’t think it’s specifically the CIA, do you think it’s the military? Do you think it’s LBJ? I’ve had obviously Roger Stone in the past, and he pushes this very much to the LBJ narrative. I’ve had Lamar Waldron who pushes the mafia narrative. Who do you think is, probably has the most evidence pointing in their direction?

Jeff: I don’t think Jack Ruby knew. Jack Ruby I don’t think he had any idea of where this came from. I think that he was told you need to do this for us and you’ll be a hero. I imagine that that came from the CIA because they had the best connections with organized crime, and Ruby was a kind of organized crime wanna be. I don’t think Jack Ruby knew anything about who organized the assassination. I think he understood that it had come from on high. One of the most interesting interviews I’ve done on the JFK Facts blog was with a woman who was friends with Ruby, an exotic dancer in his club. I interviewed her by email a couple of years ago and I said, “why did your friend…”

She knew Ruby well, and this was confirmed by other women who were dancers in the Carousel Club that, that she was one of the girls who worked there and that she was friendly with Ruby and she said that she felt that… I said, why did your friend Jack kill Oswald? She said, I don’t think he had any choice. He worked for people and when they came to him, it was something that he had to do. I said, well, who did he work for? She said, I really don’t know, she was just a kid at the time, but that was her distinct impression. That Rubyuby had no choice but to kill Oswald. She said one other interesting thing too, which was that Ruby despised Bobby Kennedy, which makes sense because Bobby Kennedy was out to put all of his organized crime friends in jail. The idea that he killed Oswald because he wanted to help the Kennedy family is ridiculous. It’s patently not true.

Jim: I would have to agree with that general assumption that I don’t think Ruby really understood. I think at the time of that tape, which I think is almost a year after, I think he had a lot of time to think about how we had gotten into that predicament. He probably was … very interesting theories. At the time of what actually happened, I don’t think see the thing is what most people don’t understand is it that the Texas laws on that, if Ruby would have gone with a local Dallas lawyer instead of Melvin Belli, most of those guys will tell you that Ruby would have probably gotten five years, and he might’ve been out in three on a kind of manslaughter kind of thing.

Maybe that’s the way it was presented to him, you do this or else, and Jack, there’s really no negative to it because you’re going to be out in about three years and we’ll give you a job when you get out. I don’t think he really understood what the heck was going on, until maybe many, many months later. This was much bigger than he ever imagined, and I think that’s what he’s alluding to. See Ruby… that guy, you really couldn’t have found a better guy to do what he did. Because here’s a guy who was gun running for the CIA back in 1960-61 who was an FBI informant. He had connections to the organized crime, and he was a best friend to Dallas police. He was getting entree into that. I mean, come on, the guy was there all three days. He was running around giving them sandwiches.

The reporter needed some help. Here this guy wants to talk to you, he needs some information. That’s how friendly he was with those guys. You really couldn’t have picked a much better person, if you wanted to do what it looks like happened. And I think what happened, the problem the Warren commission had, when Ruby shot Oswald live on television, I think a lot of people, this kind of [inaudible] consciousness. Wait a minute, did they not want this guy to talk? Is that why this guy was sent in to kill him? That was a big, problem for the Warren commission. Why kill the guy live on national television, unless you wanted him to shut up?

Ricky: Russ?

Russ: Yeah. All very good points. I’ve spent a fair amount of time again last couple of years looking at Ruby. He’s always treated as this sort of Zelig character who just kind of shows up everywhere: delivering sandwiches, showing up at the newspaper, at every press conference, the day of the assassination perhaps believes some of these accounts being at the scene, being at Parkland hospital, just sort of being everywhere. You do have to ask who, who is this guy and what really was he up to. Then they also say that his clubs were failing and he wasn’t really making any money, but he’s traveling everywhere and he’s meeting everybody and he knows everybody. I think you can kind of conclude that he was definitely working for other people, and I think that was … maybe he was a freelancer who did a lot of different things.

Of course the lines between the security services and organized crime historically were blurred because of their cooperation. He does, if you look carefully, he does seem to have been an important representative of organized crime that was larger than Dallas, as well as Dallas organized crime. Seems like he was some kind of an operative who was supposed to be out all the time, kind of gathering basically like an intelligence officer gathering intelligence, and fostering relationships, picking up info. That’s what he seems to have done consistently, and so, yes, of course, as somebody just pointed out, he was in a perfect position to, I think that was Jim too, because of all these connections again, a perfect guy. If somebody was planning this and they were looking for people who were sticky. People who you look at and say, oh my God, look all these connections.

Again I mean, just as the FBI was kind of stuck in this thing, he was stuck in the whole thing. How much did he know? Hard to say, probably very, very little, but he was used to people telling him to do things, asking him to go places. Go here and do that, show up here, and he probably knew better than to ask too many questions.

Ricky: Yeah absolutely. How much more time do you guys have? I know I probably should have asked you this in the beginning of the podcast.

Jeff: I need to go.

Ricky: You need to go now?

Jeff: Yeah.

Ricky: Okay. Well, well we can end it here. Would you guys be willing to do a part two of this? We could hopefully have less technical difficulties, get into it much quicker.

Jeff: What else do you want to talk about Ricky? What else do you want to talk about?

Ricky: I think we haven’t even scratched the surface on the mob and all the mobsters and all the relations, you know, all the connections to the operation 40 and Operation Mongoose… Garrison’s investigation. There’s a whole lot that I think that we barely scratched the surface on. If you guys are willing to do a part two, we can reconnect via email and then try to find a date and time that works for everybody and hopefully continue this conversation.

Jeff: I’m not informed about organized crime. I’m not qualified to comment on that.

Ricky: Okay. That’s just a suggestion on where else this conversation would go, but is there anything that we didn’t talk about Jeff, that you wanted to focus more on or maybe wanted to, you think that should be focused more on?

Jeff: I mean, look Ricky, it’s your show. We talk about what you want to talk about.

Ricky: Obviously you’ve been investigating this for a long time. You’ve been researching this for a long time. Is there any part of this, the whole story that you think that people like myself, show hosts should focus more on, and parts of it that you think are more significant than others?

Jeff: I talked about it. The CIA’s pre-assassination involvement with Oswald is the key to the case as far as I’m concerned.

Ricky: Okay. Yeah, I guess that’s kind of the answer I was looking for to see what do you think the key to the case was. Okay well I guess, we can cut it here, Jeff I don’t want to take up any more of your time. I know you probably need to go, but yeah. Thanks guys. I really appreciate your time. I really appreciate all your insight, all your research. I think this is a story that never gets old for the exact reasons that we’ve kind of provided on this conversation. The fact that there’s so much that people don’t completely agree on and I think the one thing that we all do agree on, that there’s obviously much more to the story than the official story. I think that this was a historical event that changed history forever and really, I think it’s a story that people should, should not forget.

I’m glad that you guys have helped me with kind of reigniting this conversation, and reigniting interests in this event and really focusing on the significance of it. Hopefully I can get some of you guys back on again and maybe we can brainstorm some things that, we can kind of expand on. You guys know much better than I do, there’s so many things that we barely scratched the surface on and we couldn’t really dive deeper into. Thanks again guys. I really appreciate not just being on the show, but all the years and years of research and hard work.

Jeff: Russ: Jim: Well thank you. Thanks Ricky. Ricky, I just want to say that I appreciate that a comparatively young fellow like you takes such an interest and does this pretty selflessly. I think that’s really, really important that there’s hope that a younger generation doesn’t just toss these things aside, and is willing to learn about things that happened before they were even alive, so hats off to you.

Ricky: Thank you I appreciate that. Well, one thing that kind of sparked me to want to do something like this. I have a niece who is 15, I believe, and she didn’t know that the JFK assassination was videotaped, that the Zapruder film even existed. We were talking about the JFK assassination and I’m like, have you ever watched the video? She was like, I didn’t know the video existed. I’m like wait, what? I’m like, how do you not know the video? It kind of blew me away that there’s people growing up today who know so little about it and something that’s so important historically. I felt like if I could do my part in helping just I guess create the ripple and then spark interest. The thing about this show is I have a lot of different people on, in hopes that people who might not know somebody else’s work, they might run into it.

Somebody who’s a fan of Jim might run into somebody else’s work. Somebody who’s a fan of because I have musicians on comedians on. I hope that I just bring a lot of interest in people and I try to be as open minded as possible just like you guys, and that’s why I knew this conversation would work with you guys. Because you guys are very open to not just challenging ideas but also having your ideas challenged, and willing to kind of look at different perspectives and stuff like that. I think that’s very important because like I said at some part in this conversation, there are people who investigate the assassination and get very focused on just one aspect of it. Like, okay, everything was the mob or everything was this, this person gets all the blame.