Final_Judgment

[126] Final Judgment 187
Mafia, available in many standard sources. Scheim's book, all in all, fails
miserably in its attempt to lay the blame anywhere for that matter.
(And in light of the facts that we are uncovering in the pages of Final
Judgment it is probably worth noting that Scheim's publisher, Shapolsky
Publishers, is an affiliate of an Israeli-owned company—a fact that could
perhaps have something to do with the decision to promote a book pinning
the assassination of JFK on "the Mafia.")
That Scheim and Davis relied upon the Blakey/Billings work is
unfortunate, particularly since this book comes from what can only be
charitably described as suspect sources.
Blakey, of course, was director of the House Assassinations Committee
which concluded that there had probably been a conspiracy behind the
president's assassination and that, more than likely, elements of the "Mafia"
may have been been involved.
SABOTAGING GARRISON
Richard Billings, who served alongside Blakey in the House Committee
investigation, was no stranger to the JFK assassination conspiracy. In fact,
Billings had been the Life magazine editor who led a team from his
magazine to New Orleans ostensibly to collaborate with then District
Attorney Jim Garrison in his investigation into the JFK murder.
Garrison notes, however, that Life, instead, did just the opposite. Life
ran several major articles which linked Garrison to organized crime—to the
Mafia—to Carlos Marcello, specifically, thereby discrediting Garrison to
many who believed the tales. 341
As a consequence when Blakey and Billings teamed up to write the
book based on their experiences with the House Assassinations Committee,
they reserved harsh criticism for Garrison and suggested that he was pointing
the finger, wrongly, at the intelligence community and, in effect covering
up for Marcello's involvement in the crime.
Billings, it also just happens, was an in-law of C. D. Jackson, the
publisher of Life magazine whom investigative journalist Carl Bernstein has
described as "[Life owner] Henry Luce's personal emissary to the CIA." 342
Billings also—perhaps not coincidentally—played a recurring role in Life's
coverage of CIA-backed Cuban exile raids on Castro's Cuba.
ORGANIZED CRIME 'EXPERT'
So it was that Blakey and Billings' work put much emphasis on
Marcello as having been one of the prime movers in the conspiracy. Yet,
Blakey's allegations about the role of "the Mafia" can only be described as
suspect, to say the very least. There's much more to the story as we will
see.
A professor of law and the director of the Notre Dame University
Institute on Organized Crime, Blakey is often loudly trumpeted by the media
as one of the nation's leading authorities on "the Mafia." Previously a