[Sample B: Approval/Signature Sheet] - George Mason University

credibility of Ragano – a man who represented some of the nation’s most vicious
criminals and who first made his allegation in a book manuscript he was trying to sell.
In an example of the many ways the evidence in the Kennedy case can be
interpreted, John Canal, an independent researcher with a background in electronics,
advanced the novel theory that Oswald was the lone assassin, but was silenced by Jack
Ruby as a mob hit to protect Mafia secrets. In his book Silencing the Lone Assassin,
Canal endorsed the Warren Commission’s findings that Oswald fired all the shots at
Kennedy, and that he was a Marxist and unbalanced. According to Canal, no
conspirators would have enlisted a “’nut’ like Oswald,” who was “peculiar and
unpredictable.” 475 He assassinated Kennedy “to get even with a society that he thought
was responsible for making his life miserable,” and possible to avenge the “attempts on
the life of Castro.” 476 Canal speculated that Oswald had learned of the CIA-Mafia plots
to kill Castro by infiltrating anti-Castro Cuban groups in New Orleans in 1963. He
rejected the idea that Oswald was connected to U.S. intelligence, and argued that the
alleged assassin must have duped people active in the anti-Castro movement, including
Guy Bannister and his boyhood Civil Air Patrol leader David Ferrie. Carlos Marcello,
when told that the man accused of killing Kennedy knows about the CIA-Mafia plots and
may talk, decided to have Jack Ruby silence Oswald in “a classic Mob hit.” 477
Canal’s theory seems far-fetched, but Ruby’s gangland-style slaying of Oswald
and the nightclub owner’s many ties to the underworld has convinced many conspiracy
475
John Canal, Silencing the Lone Assassin, (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 2000), 52.
476
Canal, 68,
477
Canal, 97.
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