Louie Steven Witt: Mafia Guy

[Brian Schmidt]

Lance,

It appears you have limited knowledge of the insurance industry and financial instruments in general.  Insurance policies, mortgages, and other loans are bought and sold between existing financial institutions that don't merge or go out of business.  This all depends on the mix of assets they want to hold, the amount of risk they want in their portfolio, and geographic and regulatory considerations.  But companies spin off certain assets and take on others all the time.  This is a regular part of business in the financial and insurance sector.

This is what happened with Guarantee and Rio Grande.  I looked into this years back and some of Guarantee's assets were indeed sold to Rio Grande.  In order to do a proper analysis on all of this, one would need to go back and look at specific records to see if this was because of or involving the alleged Mafia loans.  And it would probably include going to a physical location and getting a hold of these records - not just searching for them online, where this level of detail likely doesn't exist. 

In any event, this is an admittedly tenuous connection between Marcello and Rio Grande, let alone Marcello and Witt.  But this isn't why I think Witt is suspicious.  To my thinking, I already believe there was a conspiracy that killed Kennedy for other reasons.  This makes it even more suspicious, IMO, that the exact spot where Kennedy was shot there would be a man pumping an umbrella next to a man pumping his fist in a militant fashion.  Witt's statements to the HSCA conflict with what is shown by various films and photographs and his lack of memory of certain things seem dubious to me.  That doesn't mean he had anything to do with a conspiracy or was necessarily lying.  But it opens two possibilities: that it was really him and the whole circumstance and testimony was somewhat improbable but true, or he wasn't really the Umbrella Man but testified because he was under pressure from someone.  Having scant information on him and a clean criminal record, your guess is as good as mine as to why he would have done this.  This is why I mentioned the connection between Marcello and his employer at the time in a one-off fashion.  You obviously picked up that the connection was probably pretty tenuous and decided TO MAKE SOME SENSATIONAL POST IN A DRAMATIC WAY TO TRY TO DISCREDIT THIS AS "COMPLETELY BOGUS."  If that's the card you're going to continue playing, I don't have an interest in having a debate about it because it's not productive.

This gets to my final point about selectively challenging some of my information.  I also mentioned that David Lifton's friend knew Witt's dentist and that he told his dentist about being the Umbrella Man a year before the HSCA.  This suggests that Witt was telling the truth.  But could you imagine if I said that Witt told his dentist that he wasn't the umbrella man?  You would have immediately attacked it as, "A wild conspiracy theorist who lives in Southern California somehow has a mutual friend to a dentist in Dallas that has Witt as a client?" Show me the proof!  Maybe if you were consistent in your scrutiny, you would have mentioned this too.

 

[Brian Schmidt]

12 minutes ago, Lance Payette said:

Just to show I'm perfectly willing to be proved wrong:  It occurred to me that perhaps Guarantee Reserve might have spun off just its Texas business to Rio Grande around the time of the assassination.  Alas, according to the Texas Department of Insurance, Guarantee Reserve wasn't even licensed to do business in Texas until October 9, 1969 and had no relationship with Rio Grande:  https://apps.tdi.state.tx.us/pcci/pcci_show_profile.jsp?tdiNum=37000.

My guess is that, as Steve suggested, there is some confusion about the companies involved.  But unless Rio Grande can specifically be brought into the mix, none of this has any bearing on Witt.

The loans in questions had to do with business dealings primarily in Las Vegas, so Guarantee's Texas footprint would be irrelevant.

[Guest]

2 hours ago, Brian Schmidt said:

The loans in questions had to do with business dealings primarily in Las Vegas, so Guarantee's Texas footprint would be irrelevant.

Yes, but it would explain your understanding that Guarantee Reserve's assets had been "spun off" to Rio Grande - i.e., we would be talking only about a spin-off of its operations in Texas.  The Las Vegas loans (Tropicana, Flamingo, etc.) are pretty well covered in the legal decision I cited in my original post, where members of the Jaffe family (the principals of Guarantee Reserve) were found to have under-reported rather large amounts of income.