Father McChann and Odios

[William Kelly]

In regards to the Odio story, I think Father McChann is an important player and living witness.

Father McChann catered to the Cuban Community of Dallas, his parish supported by Catholic Welfare, which was in turn backrolled by the CIA front Catherwood Fund, of Philadelphia, Pa.

McChann heard the confessions of the Odio sisters and reportedly knew about the Oswald, Angel and Leopoldo visit.

McChann also shared the stage with John Martino in Dallas, when he was on tour promoting his book.

After the assassination, McChann disapeared, only to surface at a seminary in New Orleans.

He later left the priesthood, and was tracked down by my uncle, a Catholic priest (Father Skip), and was last known to be living in Tailand, though his mother and sister were still in Dallas.

I have an article on McChann but it won't post becaue I've reached my global limit. Oh well.

Bill Kelly

[John Simkin]

I have an article on McChann but it won't post becaue I've reached my global limit. Oh well.

Bill, just paste it in the box.

[Pamela Brown]

I have an article on McChann but it won't post becaue I've reached my global limit. Oh well.

Bill, just paste it in the box.

Please do Bill. Your article sounds very interesting.

[James Richards]

Father McChann below.

James

[William Kelly]

Thanks for the pix of the padre, James.

You got a mug of Rogelio Eugenio Cisneros?

Here's some excerpts from Lafontaine's book regarding McChann, and have read Maryanne Sullivan's book, "Kennedy Ripples - A True Love Story" (1994, San Clemente, Calf.), which Lafontaine calls the "Harlequin Romance" version of the Kennedy assassination, which follows McChann to New Orleans and Florida, but not to Tailand.

Peter Dale Scott has been spending a lot of time in Thailand, and he's awaiting my review of Max Holland's KAT, and I'll ask him about McChann.

Bill Kelly

bkjfk3@yahoo.com

Machann, Walter Michael, Father –

Also spelled phonetically as MaChann, McCann, McKann and McChan.

From: Oswald Talked – The New Evidence in the JFK Assassination

by Ray and Mary La Fontaine, (Pelican Publishing Co. , Gretna, 1996).

[p.264-265]: “The last time Father Machann was seen in his public role as shepherd of the city’s Catholic exile community was the Tuesday night of October 1, 1963. On that evening, he and other prominent members of the resettlement committee had shared the stage of Highland Park Town Hall with a guest speaker, John Martino, a fifty-two-year-old American and Mafia associate who was on a Bircher-paid tour to talk about his recently published book, ‘I Was Castro’s Prisoner.’ Martino had been imprisoned in Cuba for some thirty-nine months (during which time he befriended Silvia Odio’s father, Amador), and his three-hour book talk dwelled on the barbarism of his confinement by the revolutionary regime – balm to the ars of the gathered refugees and their circle of benefactors on the Town Hall stage…”

“Trudy Castor,…also sat on the stage with Father Machann that last evening,…later said, ‘I have no idea why he [Father Machann] left….After a week or two went by, of course, the Cubans were all talking about, well, ‘Where’s Father Machann?’ After all, this was their spiritual leader and no one seemed to know where he was or what had happened.’”

[p. 268] : “Father Machann’s disappearance was somehow connected to the assassination of the president,….he had heard, perhaps in confession from one of the refugees, perhaps from his mistress Silvia, something about the impending event. This wasn’t an absurd or uncommon opinion, it should be noted. Even Colonel Castorr (who, as Father Machann believed, had some sort of intelligence interest in the Cubans) speculated that he priest had learned something he shouldn’t have. Machann was at his mother’s Dallas home on the day of the assassination, the mother would later reveal, and Colonel Castorr had heard, probably from Mother Machann, that the father, ‘went to pieces in hearing the telecast.’…”

“…investigator Harold Weisberg had also heard that Father Machann entered ‘a home to rest’ following the assassination.”

Page 251: “….A few weeks before the assassination (Fr. Walter M. Machann) had mysteriously dropped out of sight, perhaps from a breakdown, in the city where he had been a lifelong resident. Some weeks later, after the assassination, he quietly left town and has not lived in Dallas since, though returning occasionally to visit his mother. He was last seen in (1993) in Bangkok. (Machann’s mother told Mary in a recent interview that he was visited by the Secret Service or other government investigators as recently as 1992 or 1990.).”

“But in the spring of 1964, Father Machann hadn’t yet made it to Bangkok. That April, apparently at he behest of the Western general counsel J. Lee Rankin, the Secret Service had launched an all-out search for the unusual padre, who was rumored to have bedded a number of women parishioners during his denture as assistant pastor at the Catholic church in east Dallas. After agents failed even to identify the father in Miami (where he had received his training as a Cuban refugee adviser), Secret Service inspector Thomas Kelly managed to locate Machann in New Orleans, interviewing him on Thursday, April 30.”

“The former Dallas priest (he was now on indefinite leave) had been attending classes at LOYOLA UNIVERSITY, and was, as he told Kelly, a frequent visitor of Silvia’s uncle, Dr. Agustin Guitart, a physics professor at the university. Cuitart, it may be recalled, happened also to be a friend of Carlos Bringuier’s, and had attended the New Orleans court hearing of Lee Harvey Oswald following his ‘street scuffle’ with Bringuier and two other members of the local chapter of the Student Revolutionary Directorate (DRE) the previous summer.”

“It wasn’t, of course Machann’s vow-breaking proclivities that interested assassination investigators like Kelley, but the role he was said to have played from 1961 through most of 1963 as chaplain of a Dallas group assisting Cuban refugees; for if rumors were flying concerning the priest’s sexual liaisons, they were even more rampant on a more relevant matter, the possible participation of Cubans – whether pro- or antic-Castro one couldn’t say – in the assassination of the president. On the latter matter, Machann had been in a position to be an invaluable informant.”

“Organized in 1961, the Cuban Catholic Committee of Dallas had sought to help Cuban refugees by finding them jobs and planning social and religious functions for their families. In march 1963 the committee had gone a step further, setting up a resettlement office funded through the Catholic Relief Service. Responsibility for conduct of the new office, which offered food and other living assistance for arriving exiles (who were frequently met by committee members as they stepped off a plane at Love Field), had been given to the committee’s capable director, Father Machann. In his capacity as benefactor and spiritual liaison with the Church, the clean-cut father had been a popular figure with the refugees. He knew virtually everyone in the Dallas exile community, and everyone knew him – this despite the fact (as Machann told [s.S.] Inspector Kelly in April 1964) he had made it a policy never to attend ‘any of the political meetings of the Cuban groups that were represented by the Cubans in Dallas, although he was often cajoled and entreated to attend them.’”

“That the father had often been cajoled as well by ladies of the flock wasn’t hard to believe. He was twenty-nine - three years older than Silvia – tall, and movie-star handsome. (However, the Secret Service mistakenly reported Machann’s age at this time as twenty-six.) He had dimples; he was intelligent; he was polite; he was perfect….”

“For all its good works, the Cuban Relief Committee of Dallas had been abruptly disbanded immediately after the president’s murder, by which time the handsome and seemingly competent father, though still in town, was nowhere to be found. He had reportedly taken shelter at his mother’s house, and was there on the Friday of the assassination – when he, like Silvia that day, was said to have suffered a collapse. But whatever the priest’s personal problems may have been at this time – the ones that had driven him underground – the Secret Service and other federal agencies knew nothing of them, except for the whispers of his sexual entanglements. That Silvia [Odio] had been a conquest of Machann’s (or vice versa, perhaps) had already been reported to authorities by her old socialite confidante, Lucille Connell, and tacitly acknowledged by Silvia’s psychiatrist, Dr. Burton Einspruch. The psychiatrist told Warren interviewer Burt W. Griffin that he ‘did not believe the affair with Father Machann was as serious as (the Commission) had been led to believe,’ a rather ambiguous assessment….”

April 1964, having located the missing priest, and armed with the knowledge of his suspected past with Silvia Odio, the Secret Service concocted a devious plan that in efficacy, at least, was miles ahead of the ‘straightforward’ approaches of the FBI and Warren Commission. Instead of grilling Silvia directly on her hallway-Oswald story, Inspector Kelly wanted Father Machann to call Silvia long-distance in Dallas (he would be ‘furnished the necessary funds’) and see if he could get her to tell him ‘the name of the JURE representative who had accompanied Oswald.’ As Kelly may have calculated, she might well confine things to the former lover – her ‘father confessor,’ as she called him in a 1993 documentary – that she wouldn’t say under oath or the glare of a federal inquiry. In this the inspector was probably right, but would Machann be snake enough to go along?”

“It turned out he would. He was, in fact, remarkably docile and cooperative, reportedly stating that ‘it was the duty of every citizen to cooperate to the full extent in the President’s Commission investigation and that he felt he was bound in conscience to give whatever assistance he could.’ It is possible that Machann’s docility was caused (as S.S. head James J. Rowley, Kelley’s superior, wrote on the father’s behalf) by the fact that he ‘did not realize at the time that she [siliva] had not made a full and frank disclosure of the names of the people who brought Oswald to her.’ Toward the end of December 1963, while the priest was still laying low in Dallas, Silvia had spoken to him about the Cubans who had supposedly shown up with ‘Leon Oswald’ in September, but she also told Machann she had already ‘discussed this matter fully’ with the FBI agents. Later, after Father Machann moved to New Orleans, she had written him a letter saying she again ‘discussed her meeting of Oswald with government officials.’ Consequently, Machann told Kelly, he didn’t feel that he would be ‘violating a confidence in giving any information previously given [by Silvia to] the proper authorities.’ Even so, the eagerness of Machann to participate in this game – ‘stating that he could not induce her to tell him who the people were, he could induce her to tell it to the proper authorities’ – sounds a bit edgy somehow, as if fear or nervousness is driving at it, if not the passivity that sometimes accompanies convalescence from a mental breakdown.”

“The deal was struck, and it was agreed Machann would call Silvia that same Thursday evening around 6:30. He requested, and received, privacy for his call. Then, “upon his return to Inspector Kelly’s room at 7:30 pm, he said he had made the call to Mrs. Odio in Dallas and she was very anxious to discuss the entire matter. She advised him [Father Machann] the only information she could provide on the people who visited her was that one of them said he was using the code name Leopoldo, that the second man she could identify as Eugenio Cisneros, and the third man was introduced to her as Leon.’”

“This was amazing, Where did the CISNEROS come from? Silvia hadn’t said a word to the FBI or any other investigative bodyprior to this phone call about one of the two Cubans being Cisneros….”

“…Cisneros himself would immediately jump up and deny the assertion with corroboration of his whereabouts elsewhere in late September of that year…”

“[silvia] Steadfastly refused to admit the obvious, that she had told the priest that one of the men in the hallway had been Rogelio Cisneros. After repeated questioning, the exasperated [Warren Commission attorney Wesley] Liebeler brought out his trump card, the report on the Secret Service-sponsored New Orleans phone call that Kelly’s superior had sent the Commission.”

“MR. LIEBELER. Now, I have a report before me of an interview with Father McKann by a representative of the U.S. Secret Service in which it states that Father McKann told this Secret Service agent that you had told him that one of the men was Eugeneio. But you indicated now that this is not so?”

“MRS. ODIO. No. Perhaps he could have misunderstood me, because he has the same problem with names. Probably I did tell him that the man was not Eugenio….”

[p. 251-256]

“Not many people outside the Catholic circle were talking much about anti-Castro Cubans as possible suspects in the days immediately following the assassination (when the work of the refugee committee was abruptly discontinued by Msgr. Thomas Tschoepe)…” [p. 262]

[Also see: Kennedy Ripples: A True Love Story by Marianne Sullivan (1994, San Clemente, Calf.)]

xxxyyyyzzz

[James Richards]

Good stuff, Bill.

I do have an image of Rogelio Cisneros somewhere which is so well filed away I can not find it. It might be amongst the images I have not scanned yet. I will keep looking.

Regarding the good reverend, did the name Fernando Robaina ever pop up as an associate? Robaina was Vice-President of the Peter Plenty Ice Cream Company which supposedly was started by Cubans for Cubans; easy to buy into franchise type arrangement. Anyway, Robaina was fanatically anti-Castro and money was allegedly sourced through the company for anti-Castro activity. There was also supposedly a connection between Robaina and Manuel Orcarberrio (Dallas Alpha 66) which I have yet to confirm.

Pretty loose but possibly an interesting circle of connections.

FWIW.

James

Edited November 10, 2005 by James Richards

[Robert Howard]

Is it not true that the Secret Service had a tap on Father Walter M. Machann during one of his conversation's with Silvia Odio, and that in addition he was a 'frequent visitor of Silvia' uncle Dr. Agustin Guitart, a physics professor at Loyola University (where Machann attended classes after leaving Dallas.)

And perhaps more importantly, Guitart it is said also happened to be a friend of Carlos Bringuer!

Incidentally Guitart even pops up at the court hearing for Oswald and Bringuer (Bringuer - jumped? from Alpha-66 to DRE, during that fateful period.)

A point that if correct points to some other machinations is that Odio had mentioned Rogelio Cisneros 'war name' Eugenio in her Warren Commission Testimony, right off the bat (see W.C. XI 380).

From Secret Service memo re: Rogelio Cisneros "Mr. Cisneros said he went to Dallas, TX from Miami, FL in June 1963....specifically for the purpose of contacting Silvia Odio who was to introduce him to a person in Dallas who was interested in selling them small arms. Cisneros said he contacted Sylvia Odio only once,and at that time he was accompanied only be Jorge Rodriquez Alvareda, their [JURE's] Dallas delegate, and no one else. (see W.C. XI 375)

Ostensibly, 'the person of interest' was a Uruguayan gun dealer named Juan (Johnny) Martin, according to Silvia, who also 'owned a washeteria down the street (this is in regards to Odio's residence on Oram, not the Crestwood Apt's on Magellan Circle (this was before the move to there). Regarding Jorge Rodriquez Alvaredo and Antonio Aletando Leon the two were interviewed by the FBI, Rodriguez said that the meeting in Dallas was for the 'purpose of organizing the Dallas Branch of JURE,' However no gun deal was made.

According to the 'discredited?' see 'What the La Fontaines didn't tell you' Lafontaines, pg 253 'Oswald Talked'

Inspector Kelley 'persuaded' Machann to call Silvia long distance in Dallas...and see if he could get her to tell him the name of the JURE Representative who had accompanied Oswald (to the infamous Sept 26th meeting) at Silvia's.

The stage is set and according to the La Fontaines (FWIW, I am only too aware of how controversial this is Robert) She (Silvia) advised him (Fr. Machann) concerning 'the meeting' [/i]was that one of them said he was using the code name Leopoldo, that the second man she could identify as Eugene Cisnerosand the third man was introduced to her as Leon.

In 'Oswald Talked' the source of the information in the last two paragraphs is cited as 'Chief James J. Rowley (Secret Service) letter to J. Lee Rankin - May 5th, 1964 and Commission Exhibit 2943 (6).

In conclusion, I am aware of, and agree that there are significant shortcomings to the LaFontaines work, I personally get very irritated when fellow members throw mud at other researchers, as the La Fontaines do towards Gaeton Fonzi and Anthony Summers. I do not take sides in such nonsensical business, we have enough problems dealing with the task at hand, instead of bickering with each other, and I have been guilty of this myself. Even though I do not agree with some things in the La Fontaines book, and they are not insignifcant, I might add, neither do I subscribe to the idea of 'throwing the baby out with the bathwater.'

Hell, maybe Rowley is lying. But I am still uncertain about de Torres and Murgado as 'Leopoldo and Angel.'

Edited February 10, 2006 by Robert Howard

[Guest Tom Scully]

I waded into this from here:

http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=8797&pid=262738&st=45entry262738

....and the post immediately after the one at the above link, and from links displayed in the post I

linked to, above.

http://jfk.hood.edu/...ns/Item 005.pdf

5/7/67

Dear Jim,

The enclosures are self-explanatory. My haste Is writing what may seem e

cryptic letter may not be, but 1 have appointments early this morning in geshington

that will take the entire day. Other pest-due obligations will keep me too busy for

s lengthy letter for more.than_severel week,. .

Before going down there I wrote Colonel Castor: *gain. Be was seen he wife

opened end reed the letter end phoned me* and es * consequenee he asst I lunched in the

Army-Mevy Club in Washington Friday. They both cone up hprldetee leotard*/ *noisome

end remained until about one this morning. I believe his'Zilei that he ever engaged

in gun running. They were careful to distinguish between rumor, which they labelled,

and what they seemed to retell. Asa conseepene I thinkers. Lucille Connell and

Father Mechem (the right spelling) eight be more Interest to you end I am more

than ever, vonvineed of the story, of The False Oswe1d end of the perlicipetioe.ia it

of Roll and Howard, particularly from their recollections 01001, *WO chereeter

Is remarkably like that of the Been tope from her description.

It one of your more sensitive end delicate men, possibly * lawyer (and maybe

Bill Martin, who could converse with him in Spanish if Mechem were embarrassed by

anyone overhearing them) were to speak to Mechem' in a way that indicated the priest

may hove involuntarily been Innocently involved in e scandal that was probably non,

scandalous !inti also involved Sylvia Odio end Lucille Qonnell, I think he might have

interesting information to offer, for this seems to have happened, from whet Ors.

Castorr was careful to identify as rumor she ben beard. It seems as though Meoltenn

either got drunk or was drugged somehow end such a thing wee staged, inferentially

by Mrs. Connell, about whom the Castorr'a have deep misgivings. In evaluating this

please beer in mind the strange beliefs of the radical right that the Cestorr/ s

hold and which, I believe, can color their mmnoepts of reality.

According to them, era. Connell often flashed large sums of money. They

are willing to believe she could have been CIA and so said. ". havens way of evaluating

this, but eventually a large part of 'ghat they said can be checked out. When I can

type up my note-5'a thiss-long meeting there will be other-nemes. _

AA times that coincide with the FBI reports I quote men of the approximate

descriptIon of those reports were in Bolles and engaged In public activity, ibcInding

TV speech-making (recall Sylvia/a testimony on television that Liebeler had no interest

in). Ile speaker of the group is remarkably like the FBI deserlptiog of Bell. In

describing end referring to him she kept indicating prominence to the hair in the front

end each of her hands went up to the side of the middle of her heed while she spoke,

se did Sylvia, of a reoeasion of the brir, as though there was on the top or toward

the beck a reales/on or a bald spot. this TV broadcast was part of a large fund-raining

rally at which Bell apparently spoke. There is a long-shot that semitone in Dallas

may resell this or that there was newspaper coverage. Were one to check the *news

.papers, i'd_eugaeetsoinghoth ways from December 1, 1963.,

They loaned me a 1964 Dells* phone book and in checking for the spelling of

names and addresses Mrs. De tor: repeatedly commented that 8 number of their sequelstaincee

seem to have disappeared fro$ it. Sba also used and checked for tte name

FBI AS (palm), which also like the reports, In oonnetion with Sylvies hysterectomy

end strongly auggest6d- of an affair, ea a men who arenged for Sylvia to spend her convalescence

with people named Rogers and her subsequent move to Maul.

These characters seem also to have been at the hoe of the now-desceased

Ed Schwille, a wealth radical righter, within a dee, or two of the Sunday tmlker

meeting in ')ctober end at a foeum meeting that woo taped in ieptember. she aanyot

identify them from thelizzo and Bringuier exhibits. Her versions is much more indicative

of DBE than TUBE eaexdation end of excellent Dallas conneetions.

On gun-running the colonel quotes Vfalker as saying Dallas was a center.

She often referred to Sarah 'destillo and something the FBT reports do not,

of the accompantitng of these men by s'beeutifel end intelligent women from Miami

whoeee possible neme 'h have.

The White Rock Lake meeting had Sylvia giving the invocation. These men

were there also. Mrs. O's - description of thaseeohd -Men is no nearly as tall as the

first, uenally silent, and chunky.

The hospital Cuban of the Rowley 5/6/64 letter may hove been one Sancho*,

Who had a friend possibly named Rodriguez.

She started to talk of kugustin 4Ultert end never cams beck to him.

There are some seemingly mysterious Connell-Odio, letters Sylvia left behind

when she lefts the Rogers home that Mrs. R gave to Mrs. C who gave them to Lt. Butler of

the Dallas police, who also has the 'tape referred to above (which w as widely duplie

lasted by a husbendpwife pair of chiropractors active in the forem-sold-se a mlneY4

raising device). These letters may have been written from Boston, where Mrs. 'Connell had

a doctor-son.

Nachman sew the assassination -reporting on TV fee in his parents' home and

left apparently in shock and was shortly thereafter hospitalized-small Dallas hospital.

The Hall-forum matting was October 1 at the same time Mrs. Castoar was speaking

eleeehore with Machann end martino. 't was hold in a bank building in an area

known as Farmers branch. The ppeaker was excited when he learned he was being taped

and tried unsuccessfully to get the tape, theemtening even to use the karate in which

he oleimed to be brown belt. He said in his apeoch that Kennedy was coming to Dallas

soon end "we'll get him, one way or another". The man who made the tepee of these

meetings lived in Irving. 1964 yellow section should identify, if mrs. estorr does not

"member.

There is an elderly *4.41:4004 Olen Myers, meadow Road, a World War LBO—

commander, snagged in gun-runaing. North Dallas off of Preston. Fits - October

doings from FBI reports.

1 am now already late end went to mail this in Washington to save two days

in getting it to you. I think it might be significant. I shall ask her, after she

hes had time to think of what we discussed end I recalled to her memory, to creak to

me again and before a tape machine.

Sincerely,

-Harold Weisberg

http://jfk.hood.edu/...ection/Weisberg Subject Index Files/C Disk/Castorr L Robert Colonel

Link above to .pdf file of 23 April, 1967 letter to Mrs. Robert L. Castorr from Harold Weisberg.

TAPE #1 (SIDE 2)

http://jfk.hood.edu/...ection/Weisberg Subject Index Files/C Disk/Castorr L Robert Colonel

-19-

Mrs. C: And this man's name is Lt. George Butler. I believe that I called

Lt. Butler and set up an appointment to take Joanna to his home

within the next day or two and so the MWAKIXX conversation went

on for about 2 hours with Lt, Butler. And, from then on, I sat ±

in on very tee few meetings with Joanna and Lt. Butler but they

worked very closely together.

Now, I daresay within a couple of weeks I had a call from Maryanne

Ramus. Maryanne (we were just talking about the Cubans and this and

that thing) and she said "Mrs. Castorr, if you knew something and

you wanted to talk to one xax±±x reliable person, who would you go

to"and I said "I won't tell you over the phone but let's have lunch

together". So later, we had lunch together xx at a hamburger place

and Maryanne began to tell me the story of how she was offered some

money for some information about the assassination. And I said "

"Maryanne, I'd just rather not go ex into this -- whatever this is

all about -- but I will direct you to a persona and you should tell

your t story to him". However, previously to my meeting Maryanne

at k 1:00, I had called Lt. Butler aastx at his home and set up an

appointment and went a right from there to his home. And again,

all the conversations and everything wax were between Maryanne and

Lt. Butler.

W: Before you turned her over, did salex she indicate what people and

who were interested in what kind of information?

Mrs. C: She told me that akex it was ironic that I would suggest....

Page 29 of the transcript of same interview of Robert L and Trudy Castorr as the text displayed above the following image:

...and the next page, page 30 :

....and what, of any importance is the later literary "tell all" of Lucille's "rival" Marianne?

Oswald Talked: The New Evidence in the JFK Assassination - Issue 1 - Page 263

books.google.com/books?isbn=1565540298

Ray La Fontaine

,

Mary La Fontaine

- 1996 -

Preview

-

More editions

Instinctively, I dislike Sylvia.44 Reading a few lines of

Marianne

Sullivan's Kennedy Ripples: A True

Love Story

, you know you've entered a new zone. The book, though published (in 1994) by a small

San Clemente

press, could glibly be called

...

Kennedy ripples: a true love story : a priest, a woman and the ...

books.google.com/books?id=qz0hAQAAMAAJ

Marianne Sullivan - 1994 - Snippet view

a true love story : a priest, a woman and the assassination of J.F.K. Marianne Sullivan. Published by: Lillian James Publishing 63 Calle De Industrias Suite 450 San Clemente, California 92672 First Lillian James Edition 1994 Printed in United

[Michael Clark]

April to May 1964 Secret Service doc.

http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg Subject Index Files/M Disk/Machann Walter J Jr Reverend/Item 05.pdf

Edited August 17, 2017 by Michael Clark

[Michael Clark]

Adding these as I came upon them in realated searches.