Why Roy Cohn Hated Bobby Kennedy

Life magazine said in its Oct. 3, 1963 issue: "Roy Cohn sits in a chemical complex of dupes and jugglers--all involved in the United Dye Co. conspiracy and the government's indictment of Cohn."

Somewhere in this chemical complex sits Roy Cohn.

The previous blog entry here included an excerpt of an excellent copyrighted research from DUCK KEY ONLINE about early development of Duck Key (on an island chain extending up from Key West) relative to an FBI investigation concerning whether Roy Cohn owned a residence there in his own name. As one of the included exhibits at the Duck Key website reveals, Roy Cohn was a co-defendant in a bribery case brought against him in New York with fellow Assistant U.S. Attorney Morton Robson, who had been previously associated with an assortment of questionable prosecutions, including one against Adam Clayton Powell. In a case arising 56 years after initially being admitted to practice law (a case involving German financier Guido Bensberg), Robson would eventually be disbarred.

Robson's name also appeared in FBI files--with an identification number following it (58-1232), which in other FBI files is simply designated "New York"--connected to New York Bureau information sent to J. Edgar Hoover in Washington, D.C. It appears to indicate that a copy of such investigative information was also sent to the U.S. Attorney's Office in the Southern District of New York, where Morton Robson and Roy Cohn had been employed as attorneys by U.S. Attorney Frank Hogan before Morgenthau's appointment in 1961 by Kennedy.

The bribery case brought against the two attorneys concerned United Dye & Chemical, then controlled by one Lowell MacAfee Birrell. A 1958 report from "Legat, Havana" (short for Legal Attache, or the FBI agent in an embassy abroad) to Director Hoover identified Birrell as follows:

In the past LOWELL M. BIRRELL has been associated with the Oriental Park Race Track outside of Havana. An article appeared in the "Times of Havana", an English language newspaper in Havana on March 4, 1958 reporting that BIRRELL had been ordered to pay a $3,256,639 judgment to the Dynamics Corporation of America for "frauds committed on the corporation by BIRRELL." This article indicated that Federal Judge SYLVESTER J. RYAN had filed the default judgment against BIRRELL following an inquest hearing in New York City....

Extra copies of this letter have been prepared for forwarding by the Bureau to New York (3) Miami (3) and Salt Lake City (2). Additional copies have been prepared in view of the references made to MEYER LANSKY and SANTO TRAFFICANTE in order that copies may be placed in those files.

More than a year after this report, the following item appeared in the news:

 THE POST-STANDARD, Syracuse, N. Y., Wednesday, August 26, 1959

Jurors Indict
Mystery Men
In Stock Gyp

NEW YORK. (AP) — A grand jury linked two alleged master stock swindlers in a single indictment Tuesday, charging mystery-man Alexander F. Guterma [sic] and fugitive Lowell M. Birrell with conspiracy in stock market dealings. The federal grand jury indictment accused the two once-fabulously wealthy financiers with conspiring to violate the securities exchange act by filing false and misleading reports on dealings in the United Dye Chemical Corp.

Also named in the indictment were the chemical company and Virgil D. Dardi. Dardi is now president of Chem Oil Co., successor to United Dye and Chemical, of which Guterma and Birrell were once officers and directors. Others named were Robert C. Leonhardt, former head of a Wall Street brokerage firm; Louis Levin, a Quebec attorney; Pierre A. DuVal, a publisher of brochures [weekly bulletin put out by DuVal's Consensus, Inc.]; and Harry W. Bank, described as a Wall Street "finder" or promoter [one-time promoter of Omega Equities Corp. of Los Angeles]. Guterma is free on bail now with several other charges hanging over him, all involving alleged stock manipulations to swindle other firms he once controlled. They include the Bon-Ami Co. and the F.L. Jacobs Co., a huge holding company through which Guterma acquired control of businesses ranging from lace to the Mutual Broadcasting Co.

Birrell, having fled to Brazil with a false Canadian passport, revealed his opinion of the prosecution against him to Time magazine which tracked him down in Rio in July 1959 after Brazilian police had pursued the passport violation. According to Time:

New York District Attorney James V. Hallisey flew to Rio to test whether Lowell Birrell would come back willingly to stand trial. If Birrell has a change of heart, the Brazilian government, despite the lack of an extradition treaty with the U.S., can probably find ample cause to put him on a New York-bound plane.

Perhaps someone got to the Brazilian government because several months later Birrell was still "living it up in Rio," as Time reported in its November 16, 1959 edition:

Expatriate Nostalgia. With more vodka came wistful recollections of Birrell's fieldstone showplace in fashionable New Hope, Pa., where he once kept a shiny, vintage fire engine, and reportedly entertained such celebrities as his friend the master swindler Serge Rubinstein, and some of Mickey Jelke's choicer, $100-a-night call girls. "I always took a big interest in the volunteer fire department in New Hope," said Old Fire Buff Birrell. "Volunteer firemen are a great thing in rural America." He also liked the autumn hunting. But "my house and nine-acre farm are in litigation now. They took it from me; nobody will get anything except the lawyers." [Minot Jelke's story was told in a movie, "Cafe Society," available on DVD.]

Life Magazine would do a profile on Roy Cohn some years after he wriggled out of Morgenthau's grasp. It showed his closeness to Lewis Rosenstiel of Schenley Distributing Company, another friend of J. Edgar Hoover's who was also mentioned in the Torbitt Document.


Looking back to the 1960's following the 2008 debacle of Wall Street, we can only wonder how all those stock manipulations of the past were brought to light when so much of what the same type of manipulators do today remains hidden until they bring down their house of cards, usually on our heads. They have always loved good times and the "high life".

In 1963 Roy Cohn was 36 years old, ten years removed from the high-flying days when he and Bobby Kennedy sat on Joe McCarthy's Communist-hunting committee in the U.S. Senate. The conspiracy of which Cohn was eventually accused allegedly occurred in 1959 when he entered into an "illicit scheme" to distract a grand jury from indicting the men shown in the cartoon at the top of this blog. Cohn's actions taken on behalf of the conspiracy were said to have been committed between June 1962 and May 1963, covering up the actual stock maneuvers of the other conspirators.

Cohn's foremost defense was "Vendetta!" in which another conspiracy of sorts was to blame--Prosecutor Robert Morgenthau and his superiors, including the Real No.-1 Enemy, then-Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. As relayed by the Life journalist, the events were traced back to 1955 when Lowell Birrell, a "brilliant student of the University of Michigan Law School, clubman and son of Presbyterian minister, held control of United Dye, a 164-year-old firm..." The public corporation listed on the NYSE had been destroyed by 1955. According to Life, "Birrell had already looted the company's treasury of some $2 million and picked its bones; now he was eager to dispose of the corpse." (page 26)

Roy's father, Albert Cohn, a local judge in New York and a "power" in the Democratic Party, and his mother, the former Dora Marcus, were pictured but not named in the 1963 Life article. Cohn met his fellow conspirators in 1957, though no proof was asserted in the case he even knew Birrell:

Cohn's co-investor in the Sunrise in Las Vegas was Allard Roen, manager of Desert Inn and Stardust casinos. (p.27)

Allard Roen had been a mere protege of oilman Sam Garfield before bringing him into the Las Vegas scene as a shareholder in a private hospital which in some minds linked him, through Roen into enterprises controlled by Purple Gang mobster Moe Dalitz, who had been investigated by Senator Estes Kefauver. Roen was, in turn, tied in up to his neck in United Dye with other stock manipulators engaged in a pump and dump scheme to foist the corporation onto the unwary public after "picking its bones," as Life writers had so colorfully described their blood-thirsty intentions. How all the players were brought into, and used by the perpetrators of, the scheme is deftly shown on page 29 of the Life article cited in the above link, though it takes some study to fully grasp all the intricate maneuvers. It takes even more head-scratching to see how the role of the former U.S. Attorney Morton S. Robson fits into the caper.

What made Roy Cohn's entry into the manipulations possible was his strangely-unknown relationship to the Marcuses and Cowens -- his mother's family -- who controlled the Lionel Corporation.

Keep in mind that this explosive issue of Life appeared at newsstands on October 3, 1963 and would be followed on November 22, 1963 by another exposé about the Quorum Club, and how Bedford and Angus Wynne of Dallas were involved in what Life called the "Bobby Baker Set" in the Q Club. Life was certainly ruffling some powerful feathers that fall.

The Wynne-ers' Circle

 The Power of the Wynne Family

Excerpt from Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, pp. 285-86:

Toddie Lee Wynne, Sr., the founder of the Wynne family fortunes, had begun in the 1930s as attorney for Clint Murchison, Sr. [10]  Bedford Wynne, the senior partner in the family law firm of Wynne, Jaffe, and Tinsley, was a Washington troubleshooter for the powerful Murchison oil and construction interests in Texas; we have already seen that in 1963 his questionable lobbying activities were beginning to attract the attention of the federal government.

*****

TSHA

Bedford Wynne

Most accounts of the efforts to bring an NFL team to Dallas treated Murchison and [Bedford] Wynne as partners and Wynne clearly served as the spokesman of this partnership. Wynne was the one who announced the hiring of Tex Schramm as general manager of the proposed team in November 1959. Wynne was also present at the meeting in Miami in 1960 when NFL owners officially approved the Dallas club as a franchise.

The picture above [see photo inset to right] shows Wynne and Murchison left along with Redskins owner George Preston Marshall and Tex Schramm. Marshall had been one of the more vocal opponents of expansion especially to the Southwest.

Wynne’s story is actually quite fascinating. Born July 14, 1923 he attended high school in Longview before graduating from the New Mexico Military Institute. He spent three and a half years in the Army and then attended the University of Texas. After graduating from UT he moved on to SMU Law School and was later admitted to practice in Texas.

He came from a prominent family in East Texas. His father [Angus Gilchrist Wynne, Sr.] was a lawyer [from tiny Van Zandt County] and active on the political scene. His brother [Angus Gilchrist Wynne, Jr.] was a successful real estate developer and his uncle [Toddie Lee Wynne] was a famous oilman. Wynne joined his family’s law firm and became a partner.

His interests were diverse. He was a director with such companies and organizations as Reliance Life Insurance Company the Sweetwater Development Center Junior Achievement Children’s Development Center the Cotton Bowl Athletic Association University of Texas Ex-Students Association Highland Park United Methodist Church and the nonprofit Garrett Foundation. He was also co-owner of Wynne & Black an oil business as well as the Garrett-Wynne Angus Ranch of Longmont Colorado.

In 1959 he earned media attention when he bought a share of a famed Black Angus bull named Prince 105 which reportedly carried a hefty price tag of $230,000. During the same year Wynne was actively involved with an effort to bring top professional bowlers to the Dallas area. At that time he was an official with Great Southwest Lanes of Arlington.
When Dallas millionaire Lamar Hunt and others announced the formation of the American Football League during the summer of 1959 the NFL moved quickly to announce that the older league would expand as early as 1961. The first two cities named as possible locations were Dallas and Houston and Murchison and Wynne appeared in the newspapers constantly during negotiations. These negotiations ultimately succeeded and Dallas received a franchise a year earlier than originally announced.

Because Wynne appeared in the newspaper so often many thought he was an equal co-owner. However Clint Murchsion owned 95% of the team with his brother John while Wynne was only a minority owner along with Toddie Lee Wynne and W.R. “Fritz” Hawn. Bedford Wynne held the position of director and secretary of the Cowboys.

In 1967 Wynne decided to sell his shares in the Cowboys to help organize the expansion New Orleans Saints. He also left his law practice in 1967 and began to focus on other business ventures.

After 1967 Wynne’s name surfaced less and less. In one interesting story he won a camper at the Byron Nelson Classic in Fort Worth when he hit a tee shot closer to the mark than opponent Mickey Mantle.

He was chairman of a group that operated and managed Teen America Associates which produced a teen beauty pageant for several years and he later became president of Family Recovery Inc. a family counseling service.

Wynne died at the age of 65 on December 30 1989 of a heart attack. He was survived by three daughters and a son along with six grandchildren.

[Source: Viewed at  Sports Comet  [http://www.sportscomet.com/sports_thread/view/id-10802] no longer extant.]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Continuation of Peter Dale Scott excerpt:

In August 1963 Bedford Wynne was the subject of a highly critical army audit of his "salary" from a firm with federal-government contracts (Sweetwater Development), which had been set up by the Murchisons' Tecon Corporation through the law firm of Wynne, Jaffe, and Tinsley. [11] To Wynne this must have seemed like gross political ingratitude. As recently as January 1963, Bedford Wynne had raised a half-million dollars for the depleted treasury of President Kennedy's Democratic party, after which Clint Murchison's son John was granted a mutually satisfactory interview with President Kennedy about preserving the oil depletion allowance. [12]

But it was unlikely that Wynne could escape being noticed in the mounting publicity about the scandalous activities of Lyndon Johnson's Senate protege, Bobby Baker. As noted earlier, it was in the Life issue of November 22, 1963 (p. 92A), that Bedford Wynne was first named as a member of the "Bobby Baker set" at Washington's Q Club. Subsequent Treasury and congressional investigation of Bedford Wynne and Clint Murchison established that their Sweetwater company had made payments (which looked very much like political kickbacks) to the legal firms of Bobby Baker and of Democratic Congressman Emmanuel Celler.[13]  Dallas Republican leader Robert H. Stewart III, a director of Great Southwest, had also arranged for questionable loans to Bobby Baker, via the same two Murchison employees (Robert Thompson and Thomas Webb) who figured in the Baker payoffs from Bedford Wynne.[14]

*****

The Great Southwest Corporation's Project in Texas


When Charles Hurwitz began acquiring a company called McCulloch Oil in 1978, the chairman of the
company was Charles Wood, Jr.--the man who had designed and engineered the construction of
Disneyland in 1955. McCulloch Oil had been founded by Robert McCulloch, a close business associate
of Wood. In 1960 McCulloch and Wood began to develop Lake Havasu City near Scottsdale, Arizona
around a man-made geyser and the London Bridge, which had been transported across the Atlantic and
reassembled. After Disneyland, Wood had gone on to build Freedomland in the Bronx, New York and to
work with Toddie Lee and Angus Wynne of the Great Southwest Corporation in building Six Flags in
Texas. The Great Southwest Corp., in conjunction with Webb and Knapp had gone into great debt in the
early 1960s pursuing these projects and tried to recover by selling the corporate stock to the Penn Central
Railroad owned by the Pennsylvania Company, which, at the same time, bought Macco Realty and
Arvida.

What is intriguing about this is that McCulloch Oil, the Great Southwest, Macco and Arvida were very
rich in land. This fact was no doubt known by David Murdock, who in 1964 had moved to Los Angeles
from Phoenix where he had been involved in home construction. Although he was allegedly insolvent
when he arrived in California, he founded a company that made tile to be used in construction and later
became a land developer and then a corporate tycoon. We do not know at this point whether Murdock,
whose background before that time is extremely sketchy, may have been involved with the Bonanno family which had been involved in real estate development in Arizona.


In 1956-57 the area between Westwood and Los Angeles proper, now called Century City, was owned by Twentieth Century Fox (headed by Spyros Skouras); it was the Tom Mix ranch and the backlot. But the studio needed cash and decided to sell off this 260 acres of real estate. The studio contacted William Zeckendorf--who headed Webb & Knapp--was a Rockefeller-connected developer in New York (he had hired Disney's engineer, Charles Wood, to build Freedomland park in the Bronx and who was a partner with Toddie Lee and Angus Wynne in developing the Great Southwest project in Texas). He agreed to buy the land and lease back a portion to the studio for one and a half million dollars a year.

Zeckendorf eventually sold out his interest to the Mellon family's Alcoa. He states in his autobiography that he became great friends with "General Richard Mellon," whose family has long been connected to O.S.S. and C.I.A. activities, as well as with Gulf Oil (at the time the Mellons were largest shareholders), which was an investor brought into the Zapata Corporation by the Liedtke brothers.(5) By the time Victor Palmieri went to work for Janss Investment, the Janss brothers had sold a half interest in the commercial properties, in 1955, to Arnold S. Kirkeby of Chicago, owner of a chain of hotels including the Beverly Wilshire at Wilshire and Rodeo Drive. Kirkeby changed the design of the village by bringing in highways and high-rises.

The Arizona Project, a journalistic investigation into mob activities in Arizona, which found strong financial links between Arizona real estate development and construction of Las Vegas casinos, also noted:

For [Del] Webb, the Flamingo experience (6) led to a series of deals with other developers who had their own ties to the Mob-dominated Chicago political machine, including Henry Crown and Arnold S. Kirkeby of Los Angeles,

Off the Boards

Former Mrs. George Owen

 Maureen "Mo" Kane Biner Owen (then future-wife of John Dean) was married to George Washington Owen, Jr. for a few months in 1967, but she had known him off and on since 1965. The were, allegedly, introduced by "Heidi Rikan," possibly the alias of her friend Cathy Dieter. Two years before Mo's marriage to Watergate counsel John Dean, Time Magazine wrote about another friend of George Owen--Gilbert Lee Beckley, then presumed dead:

Gilbert Lee Beckley is—or was—a valuable man to the Cosa Nostra. He helped the mob flourish in the green field of betting on college and professional athletics. Handling as much as $250,000 worth of bets daily, Beckley, 58, mastered all the tricks of his arcane trade:

• wangling information from locker rooms,
• computing odds in his head,
• occasionally bribing athletes.

Gilbert Lee Beckley

Once Beckley was discovered behind a scheme to fix college basketball games by bribing the referees. On another occasion, word flashed along his betting network that bookies need not worry about the outcome of a football game, because "the coach is betting."

Nothing if not systematic, Beckley kept his fellow bookies' identities secret. He assigned each a number, then recorded their figures in library books. Beckley, No. 11, kept his own accounts next to page 11 of the New Dictionary of Thoughts.

Two Sides. Beckley's value was not limited to the Cosa Nostra; he also worked the legitimate side of the street. He had a deal with National Football League investigators to tip them about point spreads, possible fixes and tampering with games (TIME, Aug. 22). More recently, he may have been tempted to cooperate with Government agents. Such a double life can be dangerous —even fatal. Last month, old No. 11 vanished. His lawyers have not heard from him, and he is "off the boards," or out of the play, in the betting world. Two weeks ago he forfeited a $10,000 bond by failing to appear for his trial on forgery charges in Atlanta. Some associates believe that Beckley may have fled to Belgium or Israel to escape jail. Others fear a more ominous answer. Beckley's mob associates were mindful that the N.F.L. investigators include former Government prosecutors. The mob has been worried that Beckley might try to wiggle out of his trouble by passing information to the Government. In that event, Gil Beckley would be distinctly more valuable to his friends dead than alive.

Colodny Interview of George Owen, Jr.

George Owen, Jr.

Whether it was actual fact or invention (perhaps we shall never really know), George Owen told Len Colodny, co-author of Silent Coup: The Removal of a President, in an interview in 1988 or thereabouts, that he first met Maureen Kane in 1965, and that he was introduced to her by another girl named Heidi whom he had met in Antigua. At the time he was on the island with his "running mate," Bedford Wynne, one of the co-founders of the Dallas Cowboys, and they were thinking of buying a hotel-casino owned by "Gil Beckley -- who was a world renowned gambler." This interview was transcribed and parts of it submitted as evidentiary proof in a lawsuit that would later be filed by John and Maureen Dean against the book's publisher and authors for defamation and libel, a case eventually settled.

The Portland Free Press publisher, Ace Hayes, acquired a copy of the public documents filed in the lawsuit and shared them with others. They have since been passed around digitally and have become fair use. In Colodny's book, he had made statements about Maureen "Mo" Kane (who married George Owen in 1967 and had their marriage annulled the same year) -- conclusionary statements arrived at based on dozens of interviews with people who had known Mo both before and after she married President Nixon's White House Counsel John Dean in September of 1972.

Since truth is an absolute defense to the claim of libel, Colodny submitted the interview transcripts to the court in order to show that the conclusions he made about Mo were true. We don't know whether they were true or not, and, unfortunately, George Owen is no longer alive to verify the facts. Part of his interview by Len Colodny is contained below:

OWEN: And he [Gil Beckley] was a friend of Bedford's and mine and we were going, you know, try to buy the hotel. And I walked out of my room and it was raining. And they had a little tent to walk under to the casino and there to the dining room. And I saw this girl walking a dog, a little white poodle, and this was the prettiest damn girl you ever saw in your life.

COLODNY: I'll say one thing, everybody that's ever seen this woman uses those exact words.

OWEN:"Built like a brick shit house." I said, "God damn," I said "man," and I just sat down in the mud.

COLODNY: [Laughing]

 

OWEN: I said, "I've never seen a son of a bitch as pretty as you and if you jump on my back I'll take you around the world barefooted." And she said, [Laughing] and I said "come on, I'll buy you dinner." She said, "Well, I want to tell you something, that is the most profound statement that I've ever seen a man do to get a date with me."

COLODNY: [Laughing]

OWEN: Yes, sir, I'll accept and so we went to dinner, drank some wine, had a good time and everything and she was going to stay there a couple of before she meets Mo, there, she's up in Washington and then she meets this guy from Texas and then she goes back to Washington and she seems to be tied pretty much to this guy.

OWEN: Oh yeah.

COLODNY: And, and now, now Mo meets you in '67 and then they go to Tahoe together. Now, what was the point of them going to Tahoe together?

OWEN: Maureen, ah, went with a guy who was a dealer up there. And she fell in love with this guy, and you know, they lost a lot of weight and a whole bunch of...

COLODNY: Yeah, she, this is the story she tells: "I chose Tahoe with, with my new and good friend who I'd met through George, Heidi Rikan, I skied, swam, gambled, played tennis, and hiked. I lost weight going from one fifteen to ninety eight pounds, to [from?] a size six to a three, George saw me once during this period and handed me two hundred dollars and said, 'My god, you're starving, go fatten yourself up.' "

OWEN: [Laughing] That's about right, that's about the size of it.

COLODNY: "And after several months with Heidi I finally decided I had to strike, straighten out my marital situation so I sought and got an annulment from my marriage to George Owen." Is that accurate? Is, as best...

OWEN: Oh, it could have been, I didn't know. I had a divorce, I didn't need a, anything like this.

OWEN: Well if you know, if you analyze the whole situation. I wasn't with Maureen very long. Well, I met her in late '65 and in '66 we, she left and out, in, and out, in, and then in '67 we got married. I went and got a Mexican divorce before we got married.

COLODNY: All right so in other words, Diane Wisdom was gone by the time?

OWEN: Oh yeah. Diane had been gone a long time. She traveled with Frank Sinatra's...

COLODNY: Right so, so she's gone and, and you had a Mexican Divorce and now you're...

OWEN: A Mexican Divorce and ah, this friend of mine, this, this guy we talked about, ah, you know, signed one of, as one of the witnesses or something like that. But any way I had the divorce and then we got married and then, then everything else happened.

The Miramar Hotel Casino in Antigua

So, George told Len Colodny he met Heidi Rikan in Antigua at a hotel/casino in which Gilbert Lee Beckley was an owner/manager before George met Heidi's friend Mo in 1965. The newspapers in 1959 were full of reports that Beckley lived in Surfside, Florida and was being questioned by a grand jury about the fixing of a boxing match, but nothing came of it until John Kennedy was elected and made his brother Robert the Attorney General. Six months after the inauguration, we read:

WASHINGTON (AP)—The Justice Department today announced indictments against 13 men for using illegal long-distance telephone hookups to conceal a nationwide horse race betting system. Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy said a 20-count indictment, returned by a federal grand jury in New Orleans, grew out of illegal calls to or from these 10 cities: New Orleans and Baton Rouge, La., New York, City, Chicago, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Miami, Biloxi, Miss., and Newport, Ky.

The indictment charged that the defendants, described unofficially as including some of the biggest names in horse race lay-off gambling operations, paid telephone company employes to fix switchboards so that wagering calls went through free and unauthorized. The indictment charges them with conspiring to defraud the government of taxes and to cheat the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. of toll charges. The Internal Revenue Service investigated the case. Bench warrants have been issued by U.S. District Judge Herbert W. Christenberry for the arrest of the 13. Bond was fixed at $25,000 each.

The defendants are: Benjamin Lassoff, 53, and his brother Robert Lassoff, 41, and Myron Deckelbaum, 57, all of Cincinnati, Ohio. Gilbert Lee Beckley, 49. Surfside, Fla., and Alfred Mones, 57, Miami Beach. Sam Di Piazza, 35, and Louis E. Bagneris, 60, Arabi. La.; Eugene A. Nolan, 31, Baton Rouge; Charles A. Perez, 44, Harold Brouphy, 52, and Anthony Glorioso, 45, all of New Orleans. Alfred Reyn, 52, New York City and Peter Joseph Martino, 37, Biloxi Miss.

Part of the records released by the FBI relating to the Kennedy Assassinations includes the following document at Mary Ferrell website.

Miramar Hotel Casino in Antigua, British West Indies

Charlie "The Blade" Tourine

Gil Beckley in Antigua at Tourine's Casino

 

We are told that this group of mobsters was part of the Vito Genevese Family, about whom Drew Pearson in an October column in 1950 had this to say: 

Vito Genovese of New York and New Jersey — Genovese was Lucky Luciano's gunman. He gained notoriety helping Luciano terrorize tributes from New York's brothels, fled from New York to New Jersey and now is an important cog in the New Jersey Mafia. His criminal history dates back to April 15, 1917, when he was arrested in New York city for possessing a revolver and got 60 days Since then his power has grown. He has been arrested for carrying a concealed weapon, felonious assault, homicide, disorderly conduct, burglary, petty larceny, and first-degree murder. Miraculously, however, he was acquitted on the murder charge.

 If we return to the beginning of this essay, the interview between Colodny and George Owen, we must understand that Colodny started his research on Watergate to follow up on some of the information revealed in a book by Jim Hougan, published in 1984, called Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat, and the CIA. 

Hougan himself has continued his own research, which has been published in an essay online, in which he muses about the friend George Owens first met in Antigua, whom he called Heidi:

But what about "Cathy Dieter"? Who was she? According to Gordon Liddy, Dieter's real name was Heidi Rikan. Liddy testified that he learned this from a seemingly authoritative source: Walter "Buster" Riggin, [see Watergate Exposed for more information] a sometime pimp and associate of Joe Nesline, himself an organized crime figure in the Washington area.

Formerly a stripper at a seedy Washington nightclub called the Blue Mirror, the late Erica "Heidi" Rikan was a friend of Nesline's and, more to the point, of John Dean and hisessay online then-fiancee, later wife, Maureen. Indeed, Rikan's photograph appears in the memoir that "Mo" wrote about Watergate. [23]

While admitting their friendship with Rikan, the Deans deny that she ran a call-girl ring, or that she used "Cathy Dieter" as an alias. Beyond Buster Riggin's assertion to Liddy, evidence on the issue is slim or ambiguous. One writer who attempted to verify the identification is Anthony Summers. As the Irish investigative reporter wrote in his massive biography of President Nixon:

Before her death in 1990, Rikan said in a conversation with her maid that she had once been a call girl. Explaining that a call girl was "a lady that meets men, and men pay them"---the maid had grown up in the country and knew nothing of big-city sins---she added, tantalizingly: "I was a call girl at the White House." [24]

This admission would appear to confirm assertions that Rikan was a prostitute. But Summers undercuts the confirmation by reporting in that same book---strangely, and in a footnote---that he "found no evidence" of Rikan working as a call-girl. [25]

Notes from Secret Agenda:

23. Maureen Dean (with Hays Gorey) Mo: A Woman's View of Watergate, Simon & Schuster (1975).

24. Anthony Summers, The Arrogance of Power (Viking, 2000), p. 422.

25. Summers, p. 530.

But then, Anthony Summers couldn't see evidence of Mohammad Atta's inside job in Venice, Florida, after spending weeks with Daniel Hopsicker. 


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