Final_Judgment

Final Judgment 193
connections with American intelligence we examined in Chapter 7 and
which we will examine further in Chapter 11, Chapter 12 and Chapter 14.
According to Sam and Chuck Giancana, in their biography of Chicago
Mafia boss, Sam Giancana, "Marcello was a co-conspirator with the CIA in
gunrunning operations and a fervent supporter of the anti-Castro exiles. It
was an arrangement [Giancana] said more than once, aimed at returning Cuba
to its pre-Castro glory—meaning its lucrative casinos and vice rackets." 356
But there was another realm in which the Lansky-CIA-Marcello nexus
had a close working relationship: the illicit traffic in narcotics. The Senate
Committee on Government Operations report to the 88th Congress on
"Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics" had pinpointed New
Orleans—at that time—as having been the key distribution point for drugs
coming into the United States.
Most observers believe that one of Marcello's "legitimate" businesses, a
shrimp-boat operation, was, in fact, part of the drug-smuggling—and gunrunning—network.
(In Chapter 12 we shall see, in fact, that Lansky was the prime mover
behind that drug network working in conjunction with the CIA.)
Needless to say, Marcello's central positioning in New Orleans made it
such that it was inevitable that the Mafia chieftain would have an inside
track to gaining first-hand knowledge about developments—at least in New
Orleans—in the JFK assassination conspiracy.
MARCELLO, FERRIE, BANISTER & THE CIA
After all, Marcello's personal pilot was CIA contract agent David
Ferrie, (now widely known as a result of his portrayal in Oliver Stone's
Hollywood extravaganza, JFK). Ferrie's still-undetermined part in the JFK
assassination conspiracy, and his apparent association with alleged assassin,
Lee Harvey Oswald, is but another piece of the whole puzzle.
It was Ferrie's associate, Guy Banister, whose New Orleans private
detective agency (a conduit for CIA arms to the anti-Castro Cuban exiles)
employed several other Marcello cronies. Banister, who had been with the
Office of Naval Intelligence, and was later special-agent-in-charge of the
Chicago office of the FBI, had re-located to New Orleans. 357
According to the Giancanas, Banister had long been close to the
Chicago Mafia and that it was their good offices that brought Banister into
Marcello's sphere of influence when the former FBI man went to New
Orleans, initially working for the city police department. 358
(During the summer of 1963 the Cuban Revolutionary Council, a
creation of the CIA's chief liaison with the anti-Castro Cuban groups, E.
Howard Hunt, also maintained offices in the same building as Banister. 359
We first met Hunt, of course, in Chapter 9 where we learned of a libel trial
in which both Hunt and the CIA were directly implicated in the JFK
assassination.)
Banister, clearly, was the intermediary between the CIA and the Lansky-
Marcello operation in New Orleans. And it was through his office that Lee