Bill Decker and John Tower

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

So, off to the incident that Gary is best known for.  I have written the straight version, here, so there is no need to belabor it.  Gary heard straight from John Tower that Oswald’s role in the assassination was to play a fake assassin in a fabricated assassination attempt, as a way to frame Castro and spur JFK to authorize an outright invasion of Cuba.  It was E. Howard Hunt’s grand plan, which was eerily similar to Operation Northwoods.  Now that we know how close humanity came to a nuclear holocaust over the Cuban Missile Crisis, Hunt’s plan (and Northwoods) was something right out of Dr. Strangelove.  

I read Gary’s account of the Tower conversation in 1989, and before then, I was not a student of the JFK assassination.  My father was a fan of JFK (he visited my father’s naval base the same year that he died, and my father got within a few feet of him), and one of his coworkers shouted his approval in the halls when JFK was murdered, and my father thought that the Warren Commission was a whitewash, but I really did not know much about the assassination when I read Gary’s account.  Over the next dozen years, however, I became a student of the assassination, with a few bookshelves of my library devoted to the issue, and I first went public with my take on the hit in 2001.  

A reproduction of that chapter of Gary’s book is on the Internet, accompanied by critical analysis, but that author’s criticisms have no bearing on the veracity of what Gary witnessed.  Gary’s misspelling of Dealey Plaza, for instance, is irrelevant to that issue, as are the rest of the criticisms.  I have no doubt that Gary was reporting the Tower conversation to the best of his recollection.  Gary’s book is going to become rarer and likely more expensive, before it completely disappears from circulation, as I doubt that his book will be reprinted again.  I am really the only person on the Internet who writes about Gary much, and that is too bad.  

In my cover-up essay, my work on the Moon landings was more immediately relevant to me, as the publication of that essay led me to finding evidence that the Moon landings happened as advertised, and that section on Apollo is what led Brian to invite me to hang out with him, which began our collaborations in earnest, and a couple of years later, we co-founded the New Energy Movement.  

During the 12 years before I went public with what I thought, I never saw any convincing piece of evidence contradict Gary’s account of the Tower conversation, and over the years, as more evidence came to light, such as the Northwoods documents, Gary’s account became even more impressive.  Gary did not reveal Tower’s identity until after he died in a plane crash, as Audie Murphy also did, and Gary did not think that they were accidents.  A coming post will deal with bringing planes down to clean up operations and witnesses.  

Best,

Wade

Edited August 6, 2018 by Wade Frazier

[Ron Bulman]

I've not read this whole thread but intend to.  As an aside at this point regarding Bill K's original post,

Good chance Murphy knew Decker given the prestige of each.  Murphy was from one county east of Dallas county.  There was a regular Audie Murphy rodeo on the Dallas/Tarrant county line to the west in Euless.  He traversed Dallas county and I'm sure was feted by county oil men given his hero/movie star status, they were all on friendly terms with the Sherriff.

Regarding why Ruidoso, a semi safe getaway to discuss the subject away from local ears for Tower.  A 500 mile escape to the southern most tip of the Rockies to watch the ponies run in the cooler mountain air or Ski Apache in the winter.  Not that long a trip by air.  Many wealthy central/west Texans own property there.   

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

As somebody who writes popularized science, I acknowledge the distinction between facts and theories.  Facts are data that people can generally agree on.  Think of them as dots, if you will.  Theories are how scientists attempt to connect the dots, to understand how the universe works.  As Einstein said, every theory eventually dies at the hands of new facts, and he expected that his theories would eventually die at the hands of new facts, but that the best parts of his theories would survive in the new ones.  That is a scientific ideal, and arguably the scientific ideal.  

Gary’s reporting of the John Tower conversation is not a theory but a fact.  It is not a reproducible fact, which scientific theories are ideally predicated on, and people can argue that it is a false rendering of the events or even made out of whole cloth, which would make Gary a xxxx or insane.  Gary wrote that Tower said that he had no idea who the real assassins were, but Tower’s reporting, if Gary’s rendition is accepted at all, destroys the idea that Oswald was the lone assassin.  For me, that is enough, especially for the lesson that I take from the entire affair, which is that the official investigation was a sham from the outset.  The world’s most powerful retail politician can be murdered in broad daylight in front of hundreds of witnesses, and it all gets covered up.  JFK’s murder was akin to a palace coup, and the man that he fired a couple of years earlier led the “investigation” into his death, and that man ran America’s spook apparatus for many years.  The conflicts of interest are breathtaking.  The most immediate beneficiary of the crime shared a wink as he was being sworn in next to a blood-spattered Jackie Kennedy.  

Criminal prosecutions are based on the idea of using admissible facts and convincingly connecting the dots, in order to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the perpetrator is guilty of the crime.  I am well aware of the vast gulf between practice and theory in legal practice in the USA; I lived it all too vividly.  The entire point of Ed Herman’s media analysis career was examining how the media handled the facts.  

But dots are dots, and should not be confused with attempts to connect them.  Gary’s book only spends about a chapter dealing with JFK’s murder.  Gary’s profession was solving crimes, so it was only natural for him to take Tower’s testimony and try to connect the dots.  That is largely where Gary and I parted ways on the JFK hit.  It was not that Gary’s work on that should be dismissed out of hand, but his reporting of the Tower conversation was enough for me, and in the nearly 30 years of examining the JFK assassination evidence, I never saw a convincing piece of evidence contradict Gary’s Tower story, and since Gary first published his book in 1987, more evidence, such as the Northwoods documents, powerfully supports Gary’s tale.  I have seen Gary’s Tower story described as the nexus for tying together many disparate elements of the JFK hit, including the connections to the CIA, FBI, Texas, oil men, George Bush the First, and Cuba.  

So far, in this string of posts, I covered some of Gary’s interactions with Jewish mobsters, including Cohen, Ruby, and one of Cohen’s protégés who was a federal judge for nearly 40 years.  Gary thought that Jewish mobsters were behind the JFK hit, and while I never dismissed the idea, I don’t find it highly persuasive, nor do I find any theory on the identity of the perpetrators to be conclusive.  There is a great deal of data on the matter, of various levels of credibility and relevance, and many lifetimes have been spent connecting those dots, or failing to.  But I need to give Gary’s views on the matter some justice, so I will present them, but reading Gary’s work is going to be better than my rendition of it.  There are others who could do a better job of it, but none of them are either alive today or actively writing, so this task seems to fall to me for now.  

I don’t know what Gary’s evidence was, but he once wrote that Arlen Specter, the author of the single bullet theory (AKA “Magic Bullet”), monitored Hunt’s operation and coordinated its interposition, turning a fake assassination attempt into a real one.  Gary wrote that Jewish mobsters in Southern California were involved, and that Ruby was supposed to kill Oswald immediately after the JFK hit, but Oswald got away (when policeman J.D. Tippit was killed), and Ruby was ordered to finish the job, which he soon did.  Gary argued that Lyndon Johnson enacted the cover-up to prevent a slaughter of American Jews if the American public learned who was behind it.  The dots that Gary used to hang his theory on was the Tower conversation, his dealings with and investigations of Jewish mobsters, and a healthy helping of Anthony Summers’s book on the JFK hit (Conspiracy).  Gary connected a lot of dots from his days as a cop, but Gary was no scholar.  Gary was onboard with a theme in Summers’s book, that JFK was trying to end the Cold War, and for that, he had to go.  I agree with that idea, but far more than Jewish mobsters wanted JFK dead.  Kennedy had angered the entire Eastern Oligarchy and spook community, as a decidedly reluctant imperialist who took on Wall Street and other bastions of privilege.  His stance on Africa, for instance, was diametrically opposed to Dwight Eisenhower’s, and no president since JFK has been as supportive of African aspirations.  In fact, the West, led by the USA, is actively recolonizing Africa as I write this.  

I’ll say this, however: whoever interposed the fake assassination operation did it brilliantly, and helped ensure that the chumps that were in on the fake plan went into CYA mode and helped cover it all up.  Those chumps included the bureaucracies at the CIA, FBI, and Pentagon, and you could hardly hope for greater allies in a cover-up than those, especially when all of the “evidence” that the Warren Commission used came through the hands of those organizations.  What damning evidence could be left after they all got done with it?  There is overwhelming evidence of their involvement in switching, manufacturing, and eliminating the evidence, including the untimely demise of many witnesses and possible participants, in order to frame Oswald as the lone nut commie assassin.  I have written plenty that I consider the Carcano rifle, the Magic Bullet, the backyard photos, and the camera that allegedly took them to all be planted evidence to frame Oswald.  And with Oswald quickly silenced and in no position to defend himself, the foregone conclusion was quickly reached.  Dulles sent a “lone nut” book to the other Warren Commission members before they ever convened.  

Gary was not an idle theorist, however.  He constantly waged lawsuits, trying to get evidence on the record, as he took on the mobsters who ran Ventura County and beyond.  They tried to kill him once, when one of his lawsuits held up one of their criminal enterprises of fleecing the public.  Gary’s bête noir was the Jewish mob, and his work needs to be read with that in mind, and please note that Jews do not come up at all in the Tower conversation.  There is a long way to go before I finish this series of posts.  

Best,

Wade

Edited August 6, 2018 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Ron:

 

Decker presided over Murphy's wedding to a B-movie starlet, as I recall.  They were good friends. I think that there is a photo at this forum (or maybe another forum - it has been a while since I saw it) of Decker at Murphy's wedding. 

 

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I need to address a subject that always comes up when Gary’s work is discussed.  His writings can seem to be virulently anti-Semitic and bigoted.  I am not going to strenuously argue against that idea, but it also needs to be put in context, and it has no bearing on the reliability of his reporting of the John Tower conversation, which does not even mention Jews or other minorities, unless we want to call Castro a member of a minority, but it never came up in that context.  

I don’t want to lean too much on the presentism argument, but the writing style of Gary’s book reads like he read too many detective novels, or, because he was a detective, was it life imitating art, or was it the other way around?  If you read Gary’s chapter on the JFK hit, you can see what I am referring to.  A scholar’s comportment is not what you will find in Gary’s writings.  Gary wrote like Mickey Spillane.  

In scale, duration, and intensity, the USA is history’s most racist nation, built on the blood of the natives, while the sweat of slaves powered the South’s plantations.  Every ethnic group in the USA had some colorful epithet used to describe them.  My father called me a “squarehead” while growing up, and I call myself that at times, and that was a polite epithet compared to the others that I heard while growing up.  When I was teenager, there was a series of ethnic joke books that were bestsellers.  I hardly went a day during my teenage years without hearing a “n joke” or a joke about Mexicans.  That crap began coming out of my mouth, too, and it was not until I left home for the university that a roommate began to call me on it, and I soon realized what kind of barn I had been raised in.  By my college graduation, I had put it behind me.  I could go an entire year without hearing the word “n” until ten minutes after arriving at my childhood home for a visit.  It began to feel like I was in a time warp whenever I visited home.  Go forward another decade, when I was a controller of a trucking company in Ohio, and many of our drivers were from the South or Appalachia, and a string of four-letter words could be morning greetings.  Grandmotherly types would swear like sailors.

Before I got that job, I worked at a bank in rural Ohio, and the people there tried to get me fired my first week on the job, because I was not from their small town, as I got to experience Appalachian xenophobia.  For all that I had been through during my days with Dennis, I was still shocked.  After being at the trucking company for a few months and becoming accepted (I was a superstar in that industry), one day a colleague decided to regale me with reading “jokes” to me from a black joke book, and I imagine that it was from that bestselling series.  I was horrified to be in that situation, and after a minute of hearing those “jokes,” I said that I was a recovering racist and I could not listen to such “humor.”  The president of my trucking company made his disdain of black people very clear, and if anything turned up missing at our office, he immediately suspected the two black people at our company.  For five years, I watched him pat a co-worker peer on the butt, nearly daily.  Sexual harassment was part of the daily environment.  I saw that kind of good old boy bigotry go all the way to the CEO, and it was a publicly held company.  

That was in the 1990s, not so long ago, although we could say that the trucking industry was a little earthier than the norm.  It was far worse in the 1970s, 1950s, and earlier.  Lynching was an American sport, with the murders taking place in a festive atmosphere, clear into my lifetime.  That was after the American Indian had largely been exterminated, amongst the lusty cheers.  In the 1960s and 1970s, the USA murdered “gooks” by the millions.  Gary was a sailor, in the Pacific Theater, which was where the most racist fighting in all of World War II happened.  As Paul Fussell wrote of in his books on World War II, the favorite noun, adjective, and verb of American soldiers in World War II began with the letter “F.”  The kinds of behaviors that I saw in the 1990s would not last an instant in my present work environment, but even today, women in Silicon Valley, the supposed leading edge of enlightened workplaces, are exposing the endemic sexism there (1, 2).  We have so very far to go before approaching anything close to enlightenment.  It is all born of scarcity and fear, IMO, which should disappear in the Fifth Epoch.  

Today, it is dark-skinned peoples, in a swath from Northern Africa to Afghanistan, bearing the brunt of American interventions, and if you get an American soldier alone and talking frankly, you will hear “Haji,” “raghead,” and other terms.  Millions of Africans have been murdered in the past generation by our proxies in sub-Saharan Africa.  Do you think that it if had been millions of white people murdered by American proxies, that the American people would have at least heard of them?  That awesome disparity in depiction in the American media has plenty of racism behind it, even beyond the benign/constructive/nefarious classifications that Noam and Ed invented.  

Today, American racism and bigotry has kind of gone underground.  We may slaughter millions of people as we secure Oil Country, but no American president can call our victims a racial epithet, or else there will be hell to pay.  In today’s environment, if Trump ever said the word “n,” there would likely be calls for impeachment, but if he merely slaughters millions of non-whites, then all is well in the imperial heartland.  

So, next to all of that, Gary’s anti-Jewish and arguably bigoted writings pale into insignificance, and none of it has any bearing on his truthful reporting of the Tower conversation.  Gary was a man of his time.  I knew many people from Gary’s generation, and racism and bigotry just came with the territory. JFK was a sailor, too, but was the first postwar president who did not calls blacks “niggers” in private, but Lyndon Johnson and Nixon did, and Ronald Reagan had quite a repertoire of black jokes. Hitler used the USA as his inspiration, and he was not an aberration so much as the logical conclusion of the Western mentality, and seeing how far he took it actually helped the USA start shedding its racism and bigotry after World War II.  

But, for all of that, Gary really went off on Jews late in his book, calling them devil-worshippers and other unflattering descriptions.  But Gary emphasized that his focus was on Jewish mobsters, whom he called the “Mishpucka,” not so much the Jewish people.  I have studied Holocaust Denier literature, and to the uninitiated it can appear persuasive, and I could tell that Gary had drunk from that well of anti-Semitic disinformation; there is a great deal of that kind of “scholarship” out there.  Heck, Ed’s bio at Wikipedia is outright disinformation today (par for the course at Wikipedia), and he was Jewish, as death camp Nazis get whitewashes.  Noam’s bio is only slightly better.

When I began my alternative media studies, I also subscribed to The Spotlight, taking in the entire spectrum, and I suppose that it is no surprise that a Spotlight reporter was the only author so far to feature Gary’s reporting of the Tower conversation, as the theme of Final Judgment is that Jews, and Israel in particular, were behind the JFK hit.  Again, I don’t really buy it.  Jack Ruby’s involvement definitely shows Jewish mob involvement, but I doubt that they were the masterminds.  I think that the plot within an insane covert op was hatched at the Rockefeller/CIA level, and that the cover-up was so successful that the spooks used political assassination, with a “lone nut” patsy served up each time, for a generation, and those weren’t Jewish operations.  No ethnic group has a monopoly on dark pather activities.  

For me, getting too worked up about the Jewish mob (or any “bad guys”) is to miss the point, and is a hazard of being a cop.  Gary’s life was wrecked by Jewish mobsters.  On that issue, there is no doubt, and his mission to expose them, after they wrecked his life, was understandable.  But I did not see any Jews among the gangsters in Ventura County who ruined my life.  Gary was an old-time cop who believed in the ideal of law enforcement, and that with a properly functioning legal system, American society would become more just.  That was really his driving motivation, and it is true that the Jewish mob has mastered invisibility, just like the Global Controllers have.  That is simply a professional requirement (and partly due to the Jewish journey, when they had to hide their identities to survive), so that they can play their evil games of power, control, and theft on a grand scale.  Jewish organized crime is a very understandable variation of ethnic criminal organizations, as they used their high intelligence to make their plays, relying on the pen more than the sword.  They certainly have no monopoly on those activities, but Gary’s efforts were understandable.  I’ll have some more to say about Gary and the Jews, but that is enough for today.  

Best,

Wade

Edited August 8, 2018 by Wade Frazier

[Michael Clark]

Thanks for your contributions Wade! 

I have spent some quality time reading your posts and have recently started to follow this thread. I have a remark to make and a couple observations to make regarding Gary Weans book, or the single chapter of it that I have recently read.

First off, while Gary’s over frequent use of the word Michukma ( or whatever that word is that does not google well) I only have a problem with the overuse and and simply annoying nature of the word. No one group should get a free pass from reasoned and plausible scrutiny in this case. Even now the word Mafia needs to be hyphenated if one wants to use it with regard to ethnicities other that Italian.

Beyond that, I have two observations, and perhaps thay are something open which you can comment. The first points to a problem with the credibility of Wean’s story; the second points towards his candor and possible desire to deflect attention. Keep in mind that I have only read a single chapter and these issues might be fully laid- out elsewhere in the book; but heregoes...

In the meeting with John Tower, just a few weeks after the JFKA, Howard Hunt is mentioned as a principle in a way the strikes me as if he were a household word, or an intimate of those present at the meeting. Who could have posssibly known about, or enough about EHH at that time to speak of him in such a familiar manner? I suppose I could be reading too much into it, or not allowing some room for Wean to speak, years later, about a meeting in which EHH might have been mentioned by a knowing John Tower, (who may have wanted this mans name in the record), in a manner that reflected the near household name of Hunt in the seventies, rather than with a doubtful recognition of a person a who surely must have been far more, if not completely, obscure a of EHH in late 1963.

Secondly, in that single chapter, some very important names are not even evaded. It’s like they don’t exist at all. I am thinking of DeSimonne and David Yaras. There might be others worth mentioning here, including LA politicians, whom I came across while reading the recent releases.

Does any of this resonate with you. Can you fill in some gaps from Wean’s book, or from your relationship with him?

 

thanks again,

Michael

[Wade Frazier]

Hi Michael:

My previous post gets into Gary and the Jews a bit, and yes, he uses “Mishpucka,” which means “family,” in Yiddish, a great deal, in his book and elsewhere.  They were his bête noir, for good reason, and I am sympathetic to the idea that he beat the word to death.  When I finally finish this series of posts, I hope that a lot becomes clearer, especially for those who have not read his book.  If they haven’t by now, they probably never will, as that book is fast disappearing from circulation.  

E. Howard Hunt was a famous author by the 1940s, writing the kind of stuff that Gary might have read.  I don’t know how much Gary might have known about Hunt in December 1963 before Tower talked about him.  Gary was friends with Decker and Murphy, so may have been quite privy to things that average Americans would not have been, even leaving aside his LA days.  But with the story that Tower was telling, he would have most certainly been in circles to have known who Hunt was.  Tower was thick with George Bush the First (who nominated him to be Secretary of Defense), and Bush was involved with the Bay of Pigs operation, which was Hunt’s fiasco.  The story came from Tower, and by the time that Gary began drafting his book in the early 1970s, Hunt had become a household word.  I think that your question is a good one, and don’t know all of the answers there.

I have long thought about Gary’s rendition of the Tower story, first written nearly a decade after the events, and have wondered how much might have been shaded in Gary’s mind by the subsequent years.  Similarly, I doubt that much was publicly known about the CIA’s assassination attempts on Castro by then.  A lot did not come out until much later.  So, I think that there is room to question what Gary might have remembered and presented, but he surely did not fabricate the encounter, IMO.  Gary eventually served Tower legal papers on the issue, and Tower looked like he swallowed his shoe.  Gary waged endless lawsuits, to get evidence on the record.  Even if I didn’t know him, doing that and making up a story like that does not make any sense.  He wasn’t some guy whispering in corners.  He was in their face.  

As I have written, when Gary began trying to connect the dots and solve the crime, he did what so many have done, and I have stated my doubts about Gary’s dot-connecting.  My opinion is that the mob was certainly involved, but they were likely working on behalf of the masterminds, something up the Rockefeller/CIA food chain.  On that note, I like Rodney Stich’s account from Trenton Parker of recordings of Hoover’s phone at the FBI, in which Johnson, Bush, and Rockefeller (Nelson, I would think) were discussing the JFK hit before it happened, and they said that Dulles would do his part.  To me, that one smells pretty genuine.  I have a lot of respect for Stich’s work.  Like many of us, Stich could never have imagined how deep his work would take him, leading to a wrecked life, as usual.  Larry McDonald, who had the tapes, died in the KAL 007 incident.  I have encountered lots of plane crashes like that, partly through Gary’s writings.  Gary did not think that Tower’s and Murphy’s plane crashes were accidents, or Heinz’s, who died the day before Tower did, and Gary was working with Tower and Heinz when they died.  Lots of “coincidences” like that in this milieu.  

I have stated plenty that some highly impressive JFK scholars have been in this forum, and I won’t be able to hold a candle to them on their breadth and depth of JFK knowledge.  My best contribution to the JFK issue is just making Gary’s story as visible as I can.  I have no doubt that Gary was telling it the best that he could.  As far as other mobsters go, all I can say is that the LA crime scene was Gary’s world for many years, and those are the mobsters that he knew best.  When he began naming names in Ventura County, that is when our paths began to greatly overlap.  

Thanks for writing.  

Best,

Wade

Edited August 8, 2018 by Wade Frazier

[Michael Clark]

Thanks Wade,

I thought this would be a good time to post this link...

 

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I am going to begin to leave Gary’s LA days behind now and focus on Ventura County, which is the primary setting of Gary’s book.  Gary’s career took him back and forth between LA and Ventura County.  Ventura County is adjacent to LA, and is in a different world.  LA was a big, ugly slab of asphalt, with air so thick with pollution that you could cut it with a knife, while Ventura County was largely rural, with some small and growing towns, famed beaches, and Ventura was the crown jewel of Ventura County and where I was raised from age 8 (when my father returned from his misadventure at NASA) until I left home at 21.  Ventura is the last mission town that Junípero Serra established in his lifetime, and I attended an elementary school named after him.  Serra was sainted in 2015, and in a way, his sainthood is emblematic of how our system operates.  Serra was the Hitler of California, as his missions were actually concentration camps that resulted in the complete genocide of the coastal tribes of California, from San Francisco to San Diego.  The only tribes with any survival fled to California’s interior.  

As a teenager, even I could see what was going to happen to Ventura County.  The groves were mowed down to put up housing tracts and the fields were paved over, as the hordes from LA spilled outward.  I recall seeing a newspaper article that predicted that California’s coast would one day be a big city, stretching from San Diego to San Francisco, and called San San.  That is well on its way to happening.  My first job was salvaging the lumber from a walnut fam that was mowed down, and the local post office and an office building were among the structures erected on that land.  I was the janitor of that office building several years later, as I studied business.  The man who took my janitor job (I tried to give it to my retired father) when I left for the university was an Asian immigrant, and while he was the janitor at that office building, he became a millionaire by speculating in real estate.  A janitor becoming a millionaire was a sign of the times in Ventura.  

A few miles from my home was Wagon Wheel Junction, and I grew up at the bowling alley there, where my mother worked for many years.  At Wagon Wheel was a restaurant where a local developer held court, named Martin Smith, called Bud Smith.  He built the only office towers in Ventura County, near Wagon Wheel.  Even before I left home, my father told me that people who crossed Smith simply disappeared.  He was well-known to be a gangster.  One of the funnier anecdotes in Gary’s book, at least to me, was when Gary was surveilling some of Mick Cohen’s hoods and in walked Bud Smith, who sat down with them.  Gary looked across the room and saw two people whom he recognized as DEA narcotics agents, and his partner talked with them.  While Gary and his partner had been tailing Cohen’s men, the DEA agents were tailing Smith, who was a prime suspect for bringing in drug shipments through a local port, where my father worked during his career.  Smith was too clever to be caught, however, and I never saw any newspaper coverage of him that wasn’t fawning and calling him a “philanthropist,” like that Wikipedia article does.  

I live near Seattle today, and it is getting “Californicated” today, big time, as entire neighborhoods are getting bulldozed and high-density condos and the like are being put up, as we get to experience the “success” of Amazon and Microsoft, two predatory corporations.  Seattle will be in compete gridlock soon, and I won’t be retiring here.  I saw it happen to Ventura County, and now it is happening to the Seattle area, and California developers are leading the effort.  

During the dot.com boom of the late 1990s, which was a mere prelude to what is happening today, as Seattle becomes unrecognizable, Bud Smith was up here, getting in on the action, building skyscrapers.  I worked in one of them in Bellevue, when I worked for a software company, and the woman in the office next to mine had a husband who built skyscrapers (and they soon moved to Shanghai, where the big action was).  I asked her one day if she knew who Bud Smith was, and she did: he had a glistening reputation as a straight-shooting businessman and philanthropist.  I had to laugh.  I am all too familiar with those kinds of “philanthropists.”  Being a “philanthropist,” or “liberal” judge whose conscience guided him, is a great cover for gangsters.  

A major theme in Gary’s book from his Ventura days was the real estate activity.  The judges of Ventura County’s Superior Court ultimately controlled the situation, as many millions could be made on their rulings, and the gangster judges in Ventura County were Gary’s primary antagonists who ruined his life.

Another funny anecdote in Gary’s book was when he was contacted by a retired mobster from Chicago, and they had lunch together.  In Gary’s book, you easily get the sense of the relationship between cops like Gary and mobsters.  It is like a game of cat and mouse, and even almost one of mutual respect.  Gary knew plenty of mobsters, and his job was putting them behind bars if he could, but he had to play by the rules of the game.  He watched a mobster bludgeon another once, but Gary knew that with their code of omertá, the bludgeoned mobster would never testify, so Gary could only watch.  The mobster from Chicago retired to the fun and sun of California, and planned to dabble in real estate.  As he began to get into the real estate game, he saw how the judges and others had the game completely rigged and under their control.  The mobster marveled to Gary.  The mob in Chicago never had it as sweet as the gangsters in Ventura County did.

Those judges in Ventura County were members of what Gary called the Mishpucka, as they were Jewish.  Harry Pregerson was a kingpin mobster judge who sat on a federal bench for nearly forty years, who made Gary’s life miserable, but the judges in Ventura County tried to have Gary killed when he thwarted their plans.  But I get ahead of myself.  Now, I will begin to show how Gary’s path and mine overlapped long before we met.  

Best,

Wade

Edited August 8, 2018 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Thanks Michael:

Yes indeed, what a coincidence.  Sometimes, an accident is just an accident, a murder is just a murder, a heart attack is just a heart attack, and sometimes making a serial murderer your bunkmate is just how the bureaucratic chips fall, but my life has been filled with way too many “coincidences” like those for me to chalk them all up to random events.  Yes, what are the odds of those two men dying a day apart?  I remember when it happened (I had already been awakened by that time), and it was five years before Gary published John Tower’s identity.  Back in 1991, I wondered what the truth was behind their “coincidental” deaths and what they may have had in common.  Well, it turns out that they had a great deal in common.  In Gary’s book, he went into a bit of detail on how plane crashes were “engineered” in Ventura County by the gangster judges to remove obstacles and “clean up” operations of witnesses and others who had outlived their usefulness.  I have a lot to write about that subject, which is coming before long.  

Best,

Wade

Edited August 9, 2018 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

I’ll get a little autobiographical in ways that I have not done before.  My parents were born and raised in Bellingham, Washington.  My father’s IQ was about twice my mother’s, which is a situation never seen in today’s USA.  He got the highest score in western Washington on the state’s high school math test, which earned him a full-boat scholarship to the University of Washington (UW) in 1954.  But in those days, men were not legally emancipated until age 21, and my grandfather engaged in his last act of petty tyranny with my father and forbade him to attend UW.  My grandfather said that the university in Bellingham was “good enough” for my father, and because my father was only 18, my grandfather could make that edict stick.  But there was one thing that my grandfather could not prevent: my father’s joining the Marine Corps.  That was how he escaped home.  He asked his girlfriend, whom he had known since age six, if she wanted to run off with him, and she did, and my parents were married on a weekend in Arizona (which did not have a waiting period to get married, like California did), while my father was in boot camp at Camp Pendleton.  He was soon shipped off to the Korean War, and in his last months as a marine, he was a boot camp drill instructor.  

They moved back to Washington after his discharge, and then my father could go to UW, unencumbered by his father’s restrictions.  He did it on the G.I. Bill, worked as an automobile mechanic on Capitol Hill, and I was born the next year.  He got a degree in electrical engineering, was about two classes short of also having a math degree, and before he graduated, he looked for work in Southern California, as he and my mother discovered year-round sunshine there and loved the laid-back California lifestyle.  We moved there in March of 1963, and my father’s first job was at the naval station at Point Mugu.  In his career’s second year, he worked at Port Hueneme, where Bud Smith smuggled in his drugs.  His 160-170 IQ became very evident, he was an inventive genius, and a couple years after graduation, NASA recruited him into the Space Race, and we moved to Houston in the summer of 1966.  

When we moved to California, we first rented a small, three-bedroom house in Oxnard.  It was a different era from today, in many ways.  Just around the corner from our house lived Denny Lemaster, who was a professional baseball player (one of whose claims to fame was giving up one of the two home runs that Sandy Koufax ever hit; Koufax’s other was against Warren Spahn).  Imagine a major league player today living in some starter home.  Back then, professional athletes usually worked a second job in the offseason, driving trucks, delivering mail, and the like.  Several years later, in about 1970, I attended an event at a music store in Ventura, put on by Denny McLain.   McLain was at the top of his game, having just won two Cy Young awards, an MVP award, and winning the World Series.  He is likely the last pitcher who will ever win 30 games in a season, and he was a traveling salesman in the offseason, selling organs (I grew up with a never-played organ in our living room).  McLain got involved with gambling and mobsters, and went to prison.  You would not see that scene today.  

In that starter home in Oxnard, we formed lifelong friendships with neighbors, and I have many fond memories of that year in Oxnard, before we bought our first home in Camarillo, but I have a stark memory of one event: seeing my mother watching JFK’s funeral on TV, as she seemed sick and grief-stricken.  Little did I know how significant that event would become in my life.  

After his misadventure at NASA, my father moved the family back to Ventura County, but the military took vengeance on him for forsaking the Space Race and refused to reimburse our cost of moving back to California, which was about a quarter of my father’s annual salary, which he was bitter about forever after.  We moved into a new house in Ventura, where my father still lives, near Junípero Serra elementary school, which I attended when it opened the year after we arrived.  I won the school’s first spelling bee, a fourth grader beating the fifth and sixth graders.  I was sent into Johnson’s Great Society gifted programs the next year.  I was groomed to be a scientist from the time I could walk.  

Ventura is where I grew up, and most of my childhood friends came from that housing development, which was decidedly middle class, but it was a little odd by today’s standards.  Engineers lived next door to butchers and auto mechanics.  Mexican-Americans lived next to “rednecks” (which my father was) and Jews, while others were rather patrician, driving their Cadillacs.  One memorable family kind of bridged the gap while I grew up, in which the children did increasingly well, wearing the most fashionable clothes as teenagers, while my wardrobe, all the way through college, was bought at the local swap meet.  I rarely wore store-bought clothing.  When my shoes wore holes in the soles at about age 12, my father made cardboard insoles for me to wear with those shoes.  When I had my growing spurt, which began when I was 14, as I grew from five-foot one-inch to six-foot one inch in three years, my pants legs ended about halfway up my shins, and people made fun of me for years, until my parents finally decided to update my wardrobe at the swap meet.

And here is an early overlap with Gary’s story.  I later discovered that those newly well-to-do neighbors had a reason for their wealth.  That family’s father is named in Gary’s book as taking huge bribes to help frame people that the local gangsters wanted out of the way.  Gary described the man as waving a briefcase full of cash (far more than his annual salary), telling Gary how easy the money was.  Gary was made an “offer” to help them frame somebody.  It was one of those offers that you are not supposed to refuse.  When Gary refused to participate, he was framed instead, which ended his career in 1970, and his nightmare began.  

As Gary’s wife once told me, Gary was a fighter, not a lover, and he did not take it lying down.  He soon used his policeman and detective background to fight back, and thus began his adventures that form the bulk of his book, There’s a Fish in the Courthouse.

Those newly-wealthy neighbors are one of many overlaps that I have with Gary’s life, and I’ll get into a number of them in this series of posts.   

Best,

Wade

Edited August 10, 2018 by Wade Frazier

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

Another theme in Gary’s book was the drug trade. It was not just “philanthropist” developers such as Bud Smith, but the Ventura County judges controlled the drug trade.  During my days as a trucking company controller, one of my colleagues used to be a narcotics officer in the military police, and one day I began to tell him of the drug trade in Ventura County and how the officials participated in it, and he replied, “That is how it works in every county.  There is so much money to be made, that everybody who can has their hand in it.”  

Over the course of my life, I have had known many people who knew about the seedier side of life, and their tales could be enlightening.  One close pal knew a man who was a drug dealer in LA in the 1980s, during the cocaine boom that Gary Webb wrote about, and one day the man got caught by the LA narcotics squad with his pants around his ankles.  They raided him when he was in a room full of cocaine and $4 million in cash.  When they busted him, they told him he had two choices: die, right then and there, or walk out of the room and never look back.  He chose option number two, and there was never any news story about a big drug bust.  A bunch of LA narcotics squad cops just got a little extra to tide them over.  The corruption goes high and low, too, especially in Ventura County.  

When my family lived in Camarillo, we again lived in a middle-class neighborhood with its fair share of rural whites (AKA rednecks), one of whom lived across the street from us, and our families became close.  The father, who was born and raised in Bakersfield (where a bunch of my redneck relatives live, as their patriarch, and my grandmother’s brother, landed there during the Dust Bowl), knew many Ventura County sheriff’s deputies, from backgrounds like his.  Not long after my company was raided, when they stole our technical material, my father told me that when our neighbor visited his sheriff’s deputy pals, inside their homes were high-end furniture and appliances that far exceeded the station in life that those deputies could afford, and they admitted that their expensive accoutrements were obtained during raids on rich people.  They just took what they wanted, under the color of law.  It was standard practice in Ventura County.  It was about then that I began to understand that Ventura County had long had a reputation as one of the most corrupt counties in the USA.  In the years since then, I been told of, and have seen, several lists of police and judicial corruption in the USA, and I have seen Ventura County in the top five a number of times, and it has even been ranked number one, beating out cities such as Oakland and New Orleans.  I remember when I was a teenager, I read about an FBI probe that exposed corruption in the Ventura City police, naming it the most corrupt police department in the USA, but that was all that I heard of while growing up.  I would get both barrels of that corruption in 1988.

Mr. Professor was a pillar of the community, the most beloved instructor at the local college, and during our travails, he knew somebody who was involved in the drug trade in Ventura, and while his pal would not name names, he said that his drug-trade colleagues were very prominent members of the community.  When Dennis was in the Ventura County jail, with his million dollar bail, he began to understand how the system worked in Ventura County.  Many of his inmates were in there for drug offences, but serving time was part of their career path.  Everybody took a turn, and it was really a business, and the deputies and judges were all part of that system.  Somebody had to do some time, to make the system look legitimate.  It was all a big charade.  

One of the more spectacular crimes in Ventura County’s history was the Lyman Smith murders.  In recent months, investigators think that they have solved the crime, but I wonder at the coincidence of it.  Smith had an airline that airlifted dairy cattle to the Shah’s Iran, of all places.  That kind of boondoggle operation could only happen with an American client regime, and when the Shah was overthrown, Smith’s effort went bankrupt.  In his book, Gary wrote that Smith’s silent partners in the operation were the Ventura County judges.  Gary wrote that when the Shah was overthrown and Smith tried to maneuver and hold the operation together, he discovered that far from coming back to the USA empty, that their backhaul cargo was drugs, which were unloaded in Ventura County.  Smith had no idea what was happening.  The judges had maneuvered it so that they got the drug money and Smith got all the risk, if the operation was uncovered.  

Gary wrote that when Smith finally realized how he had been used, he approached the judges and demanded a judgeship in compensation, as it was a license to print money in Ventura County.  The judges agreed, but a few days later, Smith and his wife were murdered in their home.  One judge’s fingerprints were found on Smith’s doorknob, and Gary wrote that they got there as the judge looked in on their handiwork, but gave the excuse that he was just going to see Smith to congratulate him.  The Smith murders were only one of a number of untimely deaths in their circle, and mysterious plane crashes of craft that took off from the Santa Paula Airport were common, and Gary’s prime suspect was William Morgan Hetrick, a pilot who owned a plane repair shop and worked with the judges, and who offloaded those drugs from Smith’s planes.  Gary wrote that Hetrick was likely the person rigging those planes to crash, and one judge who got in the way, who was a friend of Gary’s, Richard Heaton, died in a plane crash a few weeks after Smith did.  A couple of years later, Hetrick was arrested with John DeLorean in the infamous cocaine sting operation.  Gary wrote that because Hetrick was a creature of the judges in Ventura County, that they would see to it that Hetrick never testified, because it could risk unraveling their entire operation, and Hetrick never did.  

Gary wrote about a man who ran afoul of the judges later having his life threatened, and Smith’s name was invoked during the threats.  So, was Smith’s untimely death an amazing “coincidence,” or was something else happening?  I’ll likely never know, but I’ll file it away under “Isn’t that interesting?”  A couple of years after Smith’s murder, I lived a couple of blocks away from his home where he was murdered, living with my mother and her new husband, before I moved to LA and began my career.  I wasn’t sure if I would ever do it, but I will now.  My stepfather was the Vegas entertainer that I wrote about, and I am attaching his obituary.  He was the Frank Sinatra sound-alike that I have written about, who told the funny story of living across the street from the mobster who ran Vegas.  Fred played me the song on that Sinatra album that was really him singing.  He also played a record of him drumming, and the record was like nothing that I had ever seen before.  For those old enough to know, records were played by placing the needle on the outer edge, and it would travel the grooves until it reached the end in the inner circle.  The record that Fred played me was the opposite: the record began on the inner groove and ended on the outer groove.  When I expressed my amazement that the record worked that way, Fred said that it was normal for those kinds of records to be made by industry insiders.  Compact Discs came out the same year, and records quickly became obsolete, but they are amazingly making a comeback today, in “retro” corners.  Every day for months, I got home from work at the County Center to hear Fred playing that Big Band music, and I grew to like it.  One playlist on my iPod is of Sinatra and friends, which I listen to regularly, thanks to Fred.  

That neighborhood that we lived in, and Lyman Smith’s house, burned down in last year’s fire (but the house that we lived in was miraculously spared), which was of record-setting size, to only be surpassed by one that is still burning as I write this.  But Global Warming is a myth.   

Gary was right in the middle of many events that were part of my life, and after his career abruptly ended when he refused to take part in framing people, he became very politically active.  The year after I met Gary, he ran for sheriff, and the county officials quickly passed a law to make Gary too old to run for office!  He was younger than Trump and Hillary were when they ran for president a couple of years ago.  Gary sent Dennis the ballot from that election that he was barred from running in, which I have also attached, as Dennis put it in his book, largely written from prison, The Alternative, which like Gary’s book is fast disappearing from circulation.  Note that there was only one candidate for each office.  Ventura County has a well-oiled political corruption machine.  

I grew up next door to the family whose mother was the secretary of the man who became Ventura County’s District Attorney (DA).  Before Dennis and I hit Ventura in 1987, my father told me that he had learned plenty about the DA (whose name is on that attached ballot) from our redneck neighbors over the years (that secretary’s mother was illiterate, hailing from the South, where that affliction was once common; she was the only illiterate American that I ever met), and that the man was a gangster.  So, what happened to us was not entirely unexpected, and Southern California was the last place on Earth where I wanted to live, as I chased Dennis out to Boston, but my “friends” had other plans in mind.  

Best,

Wade

[Wade Frazier]

Hi:

In the western United States, if you get outside any urban area, the residents are largely rural whites, the kind who voted for George Bush and Trump, with American flags planted in every yard.  Even the so-called western blue states are red state environments everywhere outside of the cities.  It reflects who “settled” the West.  My ancestors followed in the wake of the U.S. Army as the American Indian was dispossessed with fraudulent treaties and genocide, and they marveled over how “providence” gave them that cheap, even free, land.  My father’s family is half urban professional and half redneck.  I was raised in a redneck environment, so much so that a younger brother, with an IQ of 75-80, I would guess, joined the Ku Klux Klan.  That Bakersfield side of my family was redneck through and through.  Even with the cousins of my generation, none of them graduated from high school, the women all got pregnant by about age 15, and the men usually spent time in prison for crimes such as armed robbery.  The father of the Bakersfield family that I was closest to (he was married to my father’s cousin) was beaten to death outside of a pool hall by one of the LA gangs over his drug dealing, when he was about 60 years old.  One of my redneck cousins murdered his infant son in a sensational event, and he is not the only murderer in my family.  

Dennis was raised redneck, literally, as a migrant farmworker.  The term redneck came from the sunburn on the back of their necks from their stoop labor in the fields.  Dennis was part of a wave of poor rural whites who took advantage of the postwar boom and escaped their roots, at least to a degree.  Some of my best friends today were postwar escapees from their hollers.  Dennis is a self-professed Christian fanatic, which reflects his migrant farmworker upbringing.  So, rednecks are my people, and the Fifth Epoch will lift them from their benighted condition, as it will all of humanity.  Joe Bageant was Dennis’s age and also escaped the holler where he was raised, and later wrote quite perceptively about the situation of his people.  The Third Epoch is not so far away.  Bageant wrote that rural America still has a foot in the Third Epoch, with each rural community dominated by a ruling class, not far removed from feudal lords, and Dennis encountered that when he returned home to Yakima.  

In the western USA’s big cities, you have a cosmopolitan urban core, where the professionals and elite live, usually with urban areas where the working class and poor live, and retail crime increases the more you stray from the professional/elite core.  Members of the working class neighborhoods often commute to the professional/elite core and man the stores and other institutions that service the wealthy.  American factory jobs have been getting moved to poor nations for many years, where environmental and labor laws are lax, even subfascist, and Trump capitalized on that issue to win the presidency, while the Democratic Party largely abandoned its traditional base.  When you get to the agricultural hinterlands, then you begin to see Mexican-American communities, as those people have replaced white migrant farmworkers like Dennis.  They work in often-horrible conditions, raising and harvesting the USA’s food supply.  I shop at a “progressive” grocery store that strives for “fair trade,” with properly compensated workers in the supply chain, nothing in the store was the result of animal experimentation, and the like, but for all of its effort, the world’s poor still produce that food, and homeless people beg in front of the store daily.  

In Ventura, you had the middle class neighborhoods, where I was raised, and the elites lived on the hills overlooking Ventura.  In the hinterland, Mexican-Americans lived, tending the groves and fields, which were increasingly mowed down.  My best friend in grammar school, when we attended Junípero Serra school, was the scion of a local nursery magnate, and they lived in a 100-year-old farmhouse, which was the center of the area 150 years ago, and I played on their grounds daily.  My childhood home was on that former farm, but the farmhouse itself was mowed down several decades ago, and that family retreated to Santa Paula, where its empire’s headquarters are today.  So, I grew up around Latinos, and they were my friends while growing up.  Some were born in the USA, most were not, and some were here illegally.  

A mile away from my childhood home was Saticoy, named after an extinct Chumash tribelet, and it was like a sleepy Mexican village.  A couple of miles in the other direction was Oxnard, named after white immigrants who built an agricultural empire based on beets, and Ventura was a mission town, founded by that pious padre.  

On the other side of Ventura was the “Avenue,” which is where Ventura’s poor lived, and the few blacks in Ventura.  Further out was Oak View, which was a redneck community when I grew up, which was where Gary lived, to give you an idea of Gary’s likely background.  

Best,

Wade

Edited August 27, 2018 by Wade Frazier

[Ray Mitcham]

Thanks for your postings, Ward. It is always interesting to read about the opinions of people in the depth of the country. 

[Joe Bauer]

Wade, I also find some of your personal younger life recollections quite interesting. Particularly the descriptions of the areas you grew up in as I was raised in an area of California North of Ventura but not too far away.

I share your observations regards the ethnic, economic and political make up of the people of California we grew up with during our time here.

However, I have asked myself questions about your writings as they apply to the JFK assassination. At times I have wondered whether they stray too much into your own personal world versus focusing on research areas that commonly make up this forum's usual content.

I occasionally find myself drifting into personal life experience areas more than JFK ones and after some rereading I usually realize this and edit much of them out my postings .

In your case however, I feel you have just enough valid JFK ( and many other interesting research ) information interwoven into your personal life recollection postings that I find them a compelling read.

I am most interested in your takes on corruption and how it was so much more pervasive on every level ( city, county, state and federal ) of our country's governing, judicial, policing and business framework structure than the average American could even imagine.

And how intertwined all this corruption was and in many ways still is.

And how in all these connected ways this nation wide corruption created a world in which people like JFK, RFK and MLK could not be allowed to exist and gain enough influence to threaten the true higher rungs of power, wealth and control in this corruption matrix.

Your take on the red neck parts of California and how they became this way is correctly stated. California has always had the most extreme opposite political and cultural diversities living just 50 to 100 miles apart since I can remember.  From KKK minded folk in the inner valleys and Bakersfield type locales ( think the movie Deliverance ) to the most liberal and open cultural tolerant types on the Coast like San Francisco.

Now however, the largest ethnic population group in California is Latino. Those of Caucasion ethnicity are in the minority.  

Edited August 21, 2018 by Joe Bauer