Pierre Lafitte datebook, 1963

[Leslie Sharp]

@Benjamin Cole

Another response to a recent inquiry regarding the datebook:

I think the frustrating aspect of this is: Would anyone question Hank directly? Would Hank produce the note on demand?

 

M., you're not saying anything we haven't discussed for months and months; and no one is suggesting I expect "the community" writ large should take my word for it, or Alan's or Hank's for that matter.  But, we're at an impasse.  You indicate as much. What do I do now? Let the information languish while we wait for pseudo science to prove something that is unprovable? As I shared on FB, one only has to review the history of the debate surrounding the Dead Sea Scroll (an analogy near and dear to my heart thanks to Mr. Doudna) to know that by now, few other than the cult within that area of study know whether they were authenticated or not. 

 

Re. the L - A notes:   I saw one, first hand, so I can "testify" to its existence. The one we've discussed most recently was not torn from that "godson" note, I'm certain; so it exists somewhere in Hank's files. I do have a ledger sheet, and the text of another sheet.  The physical one that I have. is extremely fragile, fading fast, and the creases have begun to tear ... and I keep it in protective storage, so what about the other notes etc. sitting in some filing cabinet?

 

I'll sound defensive now: what do you expect me to do that I haven't done?  I plan to move forward as if the datebook is authentic, and follow Hank's dictum when we discussed the issue, "take it or leave it." I know that we won't achieve academic acceptance; I also don't want to promote a fairytale or mislead the community or the public in any fashion; but I also won't let this opportunity to solve the case pass us by.

Edited July 24, 2023 by Leslie Sharp

[Greg Doudna]

Leslie S., would it be possible for you to give, to the best of your personal knowledge and information, a timeline of known whereabouts of the artifact (the datebook), dates and specifics key to how its existence became known? Who is known to have had it and witnessed it, when and where? Ending with where is it now and who is legal owner or has legal authority over making it accessible for examination (I don't mean by me)?

You are misunderstanding the situation with the Dead Sea Scrolls. Briefly, the finds and acquisitions in the 1950s, which comprise the 900+ texts (pieced together from over 50,000 fragments) known as the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran, are known authentic without any serious question today, with the only real question there being misidentified provenance questions raised on a couple dozen economic texts (not questions of authenticity of those texts, but of find spot origin not being Qumran as represented by the Bedouin sellers). More recently in the 2000-2020 time frame some additional fragments flooded the market obtaining in many cases high prices from collectors and museums, which are now well recognized en masse to have been forgeries fenced in an organized way by an antiquities dealer family conspiracy, so much so that apart from an occasional investor holdout left holding the bag with a "lemon" purchase reluctant to admit they bought something worthless, virtually nobody expert in the field defends those as authentic now.  (Anyone interested, https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/15/us/bible-museum-dead-sea-scrolls/index.html; https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/all-museum-bibles-dead-sea-scrolls-are-fake-report-finds-180974425/.)

But never mind the Dead Sea Scrolls. Please tell what you know concerning timeline, specifics and dates and whereabouts, of the datebook, the physical artifact?

Also, please cease ad homineming me (and others who raise the authenticity question), such as claiming I was intent on personally ridiculing you when I raised the authenticity question within ten days of paying for and receiving the book from Amazon and studying that relevant first question for what I could find in the book. I would not want to ridicule you personally, that was not what was going on. I did not claim a professional authoritative position, only called it as it seemed from my experience, said what I thought, which is what I think I or any buyer of a published book has a right to do. 

If there were qualified questioned-document examiners willing to examine it, to whom should the offer or inquiry be addressed? 

[Benjamin Cole]

1 hour ago, Greg Doudna said:

Leslie S., would it be possible for you to give, to the best of your personal knowledge and information, a timeline of known whereabouts of the artifact (the datebook), dates and specifics key to how its existence became known? Who is known to have had it and witnessed it, when and where? Ending with where is it now and who is legal owner or has legal authority over making it accessible for examination (I don't mean by me)?

You are misunderstanding the situation with the Dead Sea Scrolls. Briefly, the finds and acquisitions in the 1950s, which comprise the 900+ texts (pieced together from over 50,000 fragments) known as the Dead Sea Scrolls from Qumran, are known authentic without any serious question today, with the only real question there being misidentified provenance questions raised on a couple dozen economic texts (not questions of authenticity of those texts, but of find spot origin not being Qumran as represented by the Bedouin sellers). More recently in the 2000-2020 time frame some additional fragments flooded the market obtaining in many cases high prices from collectors and museums, which are now well recognized en masse to have been forgeries fenced in an organized way by an antiquities dealer family conspiracy, so much so that apart from an occasional investor holdout left holding the bag with a "lemon" purchase reluctant to admit they bought something worthless, virtually nobody expert in the field defends those as authentic now.  (Anyone interested, https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/15/us/bible-museum-dead-sea-scrolls/index.html; https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/all-museum-bibles-dead-sea-scrolls-are-fake-report-finds-180974425/.)

But never mind the Dead Sea Scrolls. Please tell what you know concerning timeline, specifics and dates and whereabouts, of the datebook, the physical artifact?

Also, please cease ad homineming me (and others who raise the authenticity question), such as claiming I was intent on personally ridiculing you when I raised the authenticity question within ten days of paying for and receiving the book from Amazon and studying that relevant first question for what I could find in the book. I would not want to ridicule you personally, that was not what was going on. I did not claim a professional authoritative position, only called it as it seemed from my experience, said what I thought, which is what I think I or any buyer of a published book has a right to do. 

If there were qualified questioned-document examiners willing to examine it, to whom should the offer or inquiry be addressed? 

GD-

(BTW, I envy your work on the Dead Sea Scrolls. Sounds like fascinating work.) 

"If there were qualified questioned-document examiners willing to examine it, to whom should the offer or inquiry be addressed?"--GD

Not only that, but then several JFKA history experts, who can hunt for clues in the text itself.  

Perhaps the datebook is a good forgery, such as period pen and paper. And then the forger went through available docs at MFF, and created the datebook. 

I think what we have to look for is recent info releases are absent in the datebook. 

This problem is compounded if the datebook is not sequestered somewhere, under lock and key. That is to say, someone could "update" the datebook with new entries, as new info comes out and is posted on MFF, or elsewhere online.

A clever forger could have  left blank spots in the datebook for this very purpose. 

Again, it is not for the JFKA community to prove the datebook is a fraud.

It is the purveyors of the datebook who have prove the artifact's authenticity to a seasoned independent, objective board of reviewers, beyond reasonable doubt. 

 

[Ron Bulman]

A clever forger.  Who?  Why?  Operation Mockingbird, the CIA?  Why would they want to stir things up at this point in time?  They're still trying to get the President to shut investigation down forever, illegally.  Still keeping files secret sixty years later, illegally.  Are they trying to throw us all off the truth, aliens did it?  Did some wealthy individual who follows the subject with too much time on their hands dream this up, create it, all as a joke on the research community?

[Benjamin Cole]

1 hour ago, Ron Bulman said:

A clever forger.  Who?  Why?  Operation Mockingbird, the CIA?  Why would they want to stir things up at this point in time?  They're still trying to get the President to shut investigation down forever, illegally.  Still keeping files secret sixty years later, illegally.  Are they trying to throw us all off the truth, aliens did it?  Did some wealthy individual who follows the subject with too much time on their hands dream this up, create it, all as a joke on the research community?

Oh come. 

Why were the Hitler Diaries forged? 

For money, notoriety. 

In any event, whenever a new document is presented to the JFKA, the onus is on the purveyors to prove the authenticity of the document or artifact.  The motives of the purveyors are unknown. 

You may recall, a pretty good fake was created some years back, of a McCone-Rowley memo. 

 

---30---

"The memorandum is purportedly a CIA missive dating from March 1964, written by Agency Director John McCone and sent to Secret Service chief James Rowley. In it, McCone supposedly sets out the Agency's ties to Lee Harvey Oswald (pictured above). You won't need reminding of who he was.

The McCone-Rowley memo (simply “the memo” from now on) contains the following frank statement, indicating that by 1963 Oswald had been a CIA agent for several years.

Oswald subject was trained by this agency, under cover of the Office of Naval Intelligence, for Soviet assignments. During preliminary training, in 1957, subject was active in aerial reconnaissance of mainland China and maintained a security clearance up to the "confidential" level."

 

So, what was the motive for creating such a fake memo? 

Unknown. 

The motives of the purveyors or the creators of the datebook are unknown.

All the more to have the datebook-artifact authenticated by an independent panel of experts.

I am surprised this is even a bone of contention.

This standard is a bare minimum for any sort of historical research. 

[Greg Doudna]

To add to Benjamin, the alleged author of those cryptic JFK assassination references in 1963, Lafitte, was a serial high-level con, making lots of money with cons. If the Lafitte datebook were to be considered authentic, and it actually solved the JFK assassination, can you imagine what the market value of that would be on the art/memorabilia/collectors' market? 

There's the possible motive. Not the only reason forgeries are done but the most common: moolah, money.

Here is a situation in which someone is withholding or preventing access to what (if it were true) would be of immense importance to history and the world--solution to the JFK assassination after all these years--a chef was the master plotter of it, who would have thought it. Someone who owns and controls the datebook is, according to reports, not allowing normal vetting and examination for authenticity by the historians of America. 

A possible motive for not allowing vetting by experts--which is the expected thing to be done in cases such as this--would be that someone knows it is forged and that is why it is not wanted to be checked. Checking for forgery is not perfect--some forgeries can be so good they can beat experts--but in the majority of cases, forgery can and will be detected.  

Ask key questions when being presented with shiny new objects such as a Lafitte datebook proposing to be the missing solution to the JFK assassination after all these years: why is normal vetting for authenticity so impossible to accomplish in this case. Who is blocking that, and why.

Forgeries of sensational texts often involve attempts to engage scholarly discussions and generate published monographs, get scholars engaged in discussing the item as if it is genuine. This happened with "The Gospel of Jesus's Wife" announced in 2012 (accepted as authentic, embraced by one of the top scholars in such texts at Harvard and other scholars, and the forger was going to profit very very big, until a brilliant sleuth exposed it as a forgery in 2016 [https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/08/ariel-sabar-what-happened-to-the-gospel-of-jesus-wife/615160/]).

Another case is Morton Smith's "Secret Mark", though this one differs from the "Gospel of Jesus's Wife" and other cases in that unlike the other cases, "Secret Mark" is hotly contested to the present day without clear scholarly consensus. Morton Smith's "Secret Mark" was alleged to be a copy he found in a monastery of an ancient letter of the 3rd century CE church father, Clement of Alexandria, telling of a "secret" gospel of Mark, differing from the public version, which must not be publicized, in which Jesus engages in secret magician rites at night involving being naked with other men, and Clement allegedly advises fellow church leaders in the know on this to lie to the public and deny the existence of this secret true gospel. About half of scholars today are certain Morton Smith's "Secret Mark" letter of Clement is forged, but about half are convinced it is genuine, and the debate is furious and ongoing in the journals and books. From the beginning nobody has ever been able to get access to the document itself for scientific testing even though Morton Smith published photographs of it and there are reported sightings and it does exist (sound familiar?). Morton Smith published a door-stopper multi-hundreds of pages of technical commentary on the text, engaging scholarly focus of attention on the minutae of meaning of its contents, on the assumption that it was genuine (sound familiar?). 

(The day I arrived at Cornell to start a graduate program in near eastern studies I met and talked with a temporary faculty member in the department who was a student of Morton Smith, just packed and leaving later that day after his year of teaching, and it was only a week after his teacher, Morton Smith, had died. Those who had access to Morton Smith's papers found no sign of knowledge of forgery among his papers; also money would not have been a motive. But Morton Smith had no use for institutional Christianity and personally believed Jesus was a magician prior to, by coincidence, finding (or perhaps someone produced for him a text in agreement with his beliefs) an ancient secret text in which Jesus was a magician. The motive there--if the claimed never-before-known copy of the ancient Clement letter is a forgery--might have been to put one over on the Church and its affiliated industry of New Testament scholarship, a practical joke on a large scale, just as Morton Smith believed the Church had itself done in history.)  

There is a market for JFK, Oswald, et al memorabilia. The Lafitte datebook, if it is written by Lafitte as purported, is authored by a con, a con for whom there is no corroborating evidence he was involved with the JFK assassination--authored by a con with a track record of finding creative ways to make money by fooling people.

Of course Lafitte is dead now, died before he could cash it out, if he was the producer of the datebook. But somebody, presumably some heir, has it today, but it is not being vetted and examined. One interpretation could be that the Albarelli book and the promotion of the Lafitte datebook is being watched to see if it can take traction in being accepted and believed to be authentic, just as some major-name North American biblical scholars for a time accepted and believed to be authentic and were in process of creating appraisal value for the Gospel of Jesus's Wife, until it was exposed and the scheme collapsed. If the Lafitte datebook did become believed by a significant sector of the public to be genuine, then that very belief could be monetized on the collectors/memorabilia market, or even by charitable donation with tax deduction at a high appraised value.

Benjamin asks the right question: the physical paper and calendar of the datebook itself is surely authentic; the issue goes to the date of the writing in the datebook--were the sensational parts of the writing in that datebook written in 1963 as claimed, or written later simply claimed to be written predating the assassination. 

Again an analogy--in the biblical scholarship world texts are dated in terms of what knowledge the texts show, e.g. the Book of Daniel of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament says it was written in the 500s BCE. But it shows knowledge in the form of detailed alleged "prophecies", of the Maccabaean revolt of the 160s BCE. That detailed knowledge of the 160s BCE is why all scholars apart from fundamentalists understand Daniel to have been written 160s BCE, not centuries earlier when the book itself claims it was written.

It is possible a similar analysis by means of what was known about the JFK assassination, and when, possibly reflected in the Lafitte datebook, could identify the true date or true date range that the latest entries in the datebook were written, which cannot be assumed to be the same as when they claim to have been written.

[Benjamin Cole]

1 hour ago, Greg Doudna said:

To add to Benjamin, the alleged author of those cryptic JFK assassination references in 1963, Lafitte, was a serial high-level con, making lots of money with cons. If the Lafitte datebook were to be considered authentic, and it actually solved the JFK assassination, can you imagine what the market value of that would be on the art/memorabilia/collectors' market? 

There's the possible motive. Not the only reason forgeries are done but the most common: moolah, money.

Here is a situation in which someone is withholding or preventing access to what (if it were true) would be of immense importance to history and the world--solution to the JFK assassination after all these years--a chef was the master plotter of it, who would have thought it. Someone who owns and controls the datebook is, according to reports, not allowing normal vetting and examination for authenticity by the historians of America. 

A possible motive for not allowing vetting by experts--which is the expected thing to be done in cases such as this--would be that someone knows it is forged and that is why it is not wanted to be checked. Checking for forgery is not perfect--some forgeries can be so good they can beat experts--but in the majority of cases, forgery can and will be detected.  

Ask key questions when being presented with shiny new objects such as a Lafitte datebook proposing to be the missing solution to the JFK assassination after all these years: why is normal vetting for authenticity so impossible to accomplish in this case. Who is blocking that, and why.

Forgeries of sensational texts often involve attempts to engage scholarly discussions and generate published monographs, get scholars engaged in discussing the item as if it is genuine. This happened with "The Gospel of Jesus's Wife" announced in 2012 (accepted as authentic, embraced by one of the top scholars in such texts at Harvard and other scholars, and the forger was going to profit very very big, until a brilliant sleuth exposed it as a forgery in 2016 [https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/08/ariel-sabar-what-happened-to-the-gospel-of-jesus-wife/615160/]).

Another case is Morton Smith's "Secret Mark", though this one differs from the "Gospel of Jesus's Wife" and other cases in that unlike the other cases, "Secret Mark" is hotly contested to the present day without clear scholarly consensus. Morton Smith's "Secret Mark" was alleged to be a copy he found in a monastery of an ancient letter of the 3rd century CE church father, Clement of Alexandria, telling of a "secret" gospel of Mark, differing from the public version, which must not be publicized, in which Jesus engages in secret magician rites at night involving being naked with other men, and Clement allegedly advises fellow church leaders in the know on this to lie to the public and deny the existence of this secret true gospel. About half of scholars today are certain Morton Smith's "Secret Mark" letter of Clement is forged, but about half are convinced it is genuine, and the debate is furious and ongoing in the journals and books. From the beginning nobody has ever been able to get access to the document itself for scientific testing even though Morton Smith published photographs of it and there are reported sightings and it does exist (sound familiar?). Morton Smith published a door-stopper multi-hundreds of pages of technical commentary on the text, engaging scholarly focus of attention on the minutae of meaning of its contents, on the assumption that it was genuine (sound familiar?). 

(The day I arrived at Cornell to start a graduate program in near eastern studies I met and talked with a temporary faculty member in the department who was a student of Morton Smith, just packed and leaving later that day after his year of teaching, and it was only a week after his teacher, Morton Smith, had died. Those who had access to Morton Smith's papers found no sign of knowledge of forgery among his papers; also money would not have been a motive. But Morton Smith had no use for institutional Christianity and personally believed Jesus was a magician prior to, by coincidence, finding (or perhaps someone produced for him a text in agreement with his beliefs) an ancient secret text in which Jesus was a magician. The motive there--if the claimed never-before-known copy of the ancient Clement letter is a forgery--might have been to put one over on the Church and its affiliated industry of New Testament scholarship, a practical joke on a large scale, just as Morton Smith believed the Church had itself done in history.)  

There is a market for JFK, Oswald, et al memorabilia. The Lafitte datebook, if it is written by Lafitte as purported, is authored by a con, a con for whom there is no corroborating evidence he was involved with the JFK assassination--authored by a con with a track record of finding creative ways to make money by fooling people.

Of course Lafitte is dead now, died before he could cash it out, if he was the producer of the datebook. But somebody, presumably some heir, has it today, but it is not being vetted and examined. One interpretation could be that the Albarelli book and the promotion of the Lafitte datebook is being watched to see if it can take traction in being accepted and believed to be authentic, just as some major-name North American biblical scholars for a time accepted and believed to be authentic and were in process of creating appraisal value for the Gospel of Jesus's Wife, until it was exposed and the scheme collapsed. If the Lafitte datebook did become believed by a significant sector of the public to be genuine, then that very belief could be monetized on the collectors/memorabilia market, or even by charitable donation with tax deduction at a high appraised value.

Benjamin asks the right question: the physical paper and calendar of the datebook itself is surely authentic; the issue goes to the date of the writing in the datebook--were the sensational parts of the writing in that datebook written in 1963 as claimed, or written later simply claimed to be written predating the assassination. 

Again an analogy--in the biblical scholarship world texts are dated in terms of what knowledge the texts show, e.g. the Book of Daniel of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament says it was written in the 500s BCE. But it shows knowledge in the form of detailed alleged "prophecies", of the Maccabaean revolt of the 160s BCE. That detailed knowledge of the 160s BCE is why all scholars apart from fundamentalists understand Daniel to have been written 160s BCE, not centuries earlier when the book itself claims it was written.

It is possible a similar analysis by means of what was known about the JFK assassination, and when, possibly reflected in the Lafitte datebook, could identify the true date or true date range that the latest entries in the datebook were written, which cannot be assumed to be the same as when they claim to have been written.

GD--

Fascinating. If I had known there was such a profession, I think I would have gone into authentifying art or documents as a profession. Too late now, but congratulations. 

Again, anyone purporting to have a true, say, Abraham Lincoln document that alters understanding of a key bit of history would have to suffer serious efforts to prove or disprove provenance.

Our standards in the JFKA community, if anything, have to be a little tougher and exacting. 

Anyone taking umbrage at the need for proving provenance of documents...well, they are in the wrong field.  

 

 

 

[David McLean]

Greg, I appreciate how intellectually satisfying it may be  to play the devil’s advocate on the many conundrums around the Kennedy assassination.

But, but …I for one would feel better about your doubts about the Lafitte document if you actually engaged with the contents of the diary itself, rather than analogies to fraud within the Christian tradition, itself based on improbable premises, if you ask me.  (After all you have so engaged with other problematic aspects of the JFKA.)
 

Methinks said  methodology may say as much about your motives than those imputed to the  author of Coup in Dallas, A Terrible Mistake and A Secret Order. That said, a full readable facsimile of the diary would go a good way to making contextual research easier…

Finally, even a devil’s advocate’s credibility ought to start with agreed facts, perhaps acknowledging that Pierre Lafitte was a highly regarded “special employee” of George Hunter White, FBN, and CIA, known and successfully used by prosecutors and DAs, and almost certainly Lucien Conein and James Angleton, etc.

[Tom Gram]

3 hours ago, David McLean said:

Greg, I appreciate how intellectually satisfying it may be  to play the devil’s advocate on the many conundrums around the Kennedy assassination.

But, but …I for one would feel better about your doubts about the Lafitte document if you actually engaged with the contents of the diary itself, rather than analogies to fraud within the Christian tradition, itself based on improbable premises, if you ask me.  (After all you have so engaged with other problematic aspects of the JFKA.)
 

Methinks said  methodology may say as much about your motives than those imputed to the  author of Coup in Dallas, A Terrible Mistake and A Secret Order. That said, a full readable facsimile of the diary would go a good way to making contextual research easier…

Finally, even a devil’s advocate’s credibility ought to start with agreed facts, perhaps acknowledging that Pierre Lafitte was a highly regarded “special employee” of George Hunter White, FBN, and CIA, known and successfully used by prosecutors and DAs, and almost certainly Lucien Conein and James Angleton, etc.

Greg addressed this directly. Attempting to get scholars to engage with the contents of a disputed text as if it is genuine is a common occurrence with forgeries. 

6 hours ago, Greg Doudna said:

Morton Smith published a door-stopper multi-hundreds of pages of technical commentary on the text, engaging scholarly focus of attention on the minutae of meaning of its contents, on the assumption that it was genuine (sound familiar?). 

6 hours ago, Greg Doudna said:

Forgeries of sensational texts often involve attempts to engage scholarly discussions and generate published monographs, get scholars engaged in discussing the item as if it is genuine.

The fact that the purveyors of the alleged datebook keep adhering to this exact strategy to shift discussions away from the question of authenticity doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, to put it mildly. 

[David McLean]

Sorry Tom,

 I guess you miss my point, or I may not have expressed it  very well. I do not take the Lafitte diary or HP Albarellis three books as Gospel, but I do recognise the force of his accumulated facts, interpretations thereupon, interpolations and weighed, debatable hypotheses, as just that. 
 

If the authenticity of, or access to, the diary is a stumbling block to assessing the new information/ interpretation in the work of Hank Albarelli and Ralph Ganis ( The Skorzeny Papers), I am sorry, and hope our different  approaches don’t get in the way of collective research.

[Paul Brancato]

I don’t think that Greg’s question about authenticity is out of bounds. Hank, Leslie and others have done much useful research on the names listed therein, and I follow them. What Greg is asking is for more information on where the diaries are located, when they appeared, whether some are still being withheld by Lafitte’s family, what is the current state of authentication, etc - all good questions - and think that impugning his motives is out of bounds. 

[Benjamin Cole]

9 hours ago, Paul Brancato said:

I don’t think that Greg’s question about authenticity is out of bounds. Hank, Leslie and others have done much useful research on the names listed therein, and I follow them. What Greg is asking is for more information on where the diaries are located, when they appeared, whether some are still being withheld by Lafitte’s family, what is the current state of authentication, etc - all good questions - and think that impugning his motives is out of bounds. 

Paul--

If the purported notebook is not under lock-and-key at an independent auditor's location----

Then it can be "updated" as new information is released to the public. 

Leave a few blank spaces in the purported notebook to accommodate additional cryptic references....

Robert Montenegro has done excellent, verifiable document-heavy work on the use of Nazis and former Nazis by the CIA. 

That is the sort of research that adds to the JFKA community. 

 

 

[David McLean]

Okay Paul, pique got the better me, and to advance this project begun by Hank and his team and engaged by us here, let’s move on from personal motives. Apologies offered in the spirit of collective endeavour.

[Paul Brancato]

48 minutes ago, David McLean said:

Okay Paul, pique got the better me, and to advance this project begun by Hank and his team and engaged by us here, let’s move on from personal motives. Apologies offered in the spirit of collective endeavour.

David - I appreciate that and completely agree. If you felt targeted please forgive me. It’s my general feeling, and I’ve expressed it now on many threads in various ways, that collective endeavor as you call it is far more likely to break new ground. 

[Leslie Sharp]

On 7/25/2023 at 12:00 AM, Greg Doudna said:

To add to Benjamin, the alleged author of those cryptic JFK assassination references in 1963, Lafitte, was a serial high-level con, making lots of money with cons. If the Lafitte datebook were to be considered authentic, and it actually solved the JFK assassination, can you imagine what the market value of that would be on the art/memorabilia/collectors' market? 

There's the possible motive. Not the only reason forgeries are done but the most common: moolah, money.

Here is a situation in which someone is withholding or preventing access to what (if it were true) would be of immense importance to history and the world--solution to the JFK assassination after all these years--a chef was the master plotter of it, who would have thought it. Someone who owns and controls the datebook is, according to reports, not allowing normal vetting and examination for authenticity by the historians of America. 

A possible motive for not allowing vetting by experts--which is the expected thing to be done in cases such as this--would be that someone knows it is forged and that is why it is not wanted to be checked. Checking for forgery is not perfect--some forgeries can be so good they can beat experts--but in the majority of cases, forgery can and will be detected.  

Ask key questions when being presented with shiny new objects such as a Lafitte datebook proposing to be the missing solution to the JFK assassination after all these years: why is normal vetting for authenticity so impossible to accomplish in this case. Who is blocking that, and why.

Forgeries of sensational texts often involve attempts to engage scholarly discussions and generate published monographs, get scholars engaged in discussing the item as if it is genuine. This happened with "The Gospel of Jesus's Wife" announced in 2012 (accepted as authentic, embraced by one of the top scholars in such texts at Harvard and other scholars, and the forger was going to profit very very big, until a brilliant sleuth exposed it as a forgery in 2016 [https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2020/08/ariel-sabar-what-happened-to-the-gospel-of-jesus-wife/615160/]).

Another case is Morton Smith's "Secret Mark", though this one differs from the "Gospel of Jesus's Wife" and other cases in that unlike the other cases, "Secret Mark" is hotly contested to the present day without clear scholarly consensus. Morton Smith's "Secret Mark" was alleged to be a copy he found in a monastery of an ancient letter of the 3rd century CE church father, Clement of Alexandria, telling of a "secret" gospel of Mark, differing from the public version, which must not be publicized, in which Jesus engages in secret magician rites at night involving being naked with other men, and Clement allegedly advises fellow church leaders in the know on this to lie to the public and deny the existence of this secret true gospel. About half of scholars today are certain Morton Smith's "Secret Mark" letter of Clement is forged, but about half are convinced it is genuine, and the debate is furious and ongoing in the journals and books. From the beginning nobody has ever been able to get access to the document itself for scientific testing even though Morton Smith published photographs of it and there are reported sightings and it does exist (sound familiar?). Morton Smith published a door-stopper multi-hundreds of pages of technical commentary on the text, engaging scholarly focus of attention on the minutae of meaning of its contents, on the assumption that it was genuine (sound familiar?). 

(The day I arrived at Cornell to start a graduate program in near eastern studies I met and talked with a temporary faculty member in the department who was a student of Morton Smith, just packed and leaving later that day after his year of teaching, and it was only a week after his teacher, Morton Smith, had died. Those who had access to Morton Smith's papers found no sign of knowledge of forgery among his papers; also money would not have been a motive. But Morton Smith had no use for institutional Christianity and personally believed Jesus was a magician prior to, by coincidence, finding (or perhaps someone produced for him a text in agreement with his beliefs) an ancient secret text in which Jesus was a magician. The motive there--if the claimed never-before-known copy of the ancient Clement letter is a forgery--might have been to put one over on the Church and its affiliated industry of New Testament scholarship, a practical joke on a large scale, just as Morton Smith believed the Church had itself done in history.)  

There is a market for JFK, Oswald, et al memorabilia. The Lafitte datebook, if it is written by Lafitte as purported, is authored by a con, a con for whom there is no corroborating evidence he was involved with the JFK assassination--authored by a con with a track record of finding creative ways to make money by fooling people.

Of course Lafitte is dead now, died before he could cash it out, if he was the producer of the datebook. But somebody, presumably some heir, has it today, but it is not being vetted and examined. One interpretation could be that the Albarelli book and the promotion of the Lafitte datebook is being watched to see if it can take traction in being accepted and believed to be authentic, just as some major-name North American biblical scholars for a time accepted and believed to be authentic and were in process of creating appraisal value for the Gospel of Jesus's Wife, until it was exposed and the scheme collapsed. If the Lafitte datebook did become believed by a significant sector of the public to be genuine, then that very belief could be monetized on the collectors/memorabilia market, or even by charitable donation with tax deduction at a high appraised value.

Benjamin asks the right question: the physical paper and calendar of the datebook itself is surely authentic; the issue goes to the date of the writing in the datebook--were the sensational parts of the writing in that datebook written in 1963 as claimed, or written later simply claimed to be written predating the assassination. 

Again an analogy--in the biblical scholarship world texts are dated in terms of what knowledge the texts show, e.g. the Book of Daniel of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament says it was written in the 500s BCE. But it shows knowledge in the form of detailed alleged "prophecies", of the Maccabaean revolt of the 160s BCE. That detailed knowledge of the 160s BCE is why all scholars apart from fundamentalists understand Daniel to have been written 160s BCE, not centuries earlier when the book itself claims it was written.

It is possible a similar analysis by means of what was known about the JFK assassination, and when, possibly reflected in the Lafitte datebook, could identify the true date or true date range that the latest entries in the datebook were written, which cannot be assumed to be the same as when they claim to have been written.

@Greg Doudna
Greg, before I respond in full, can you clarify who is the subject of your allegations here? Who specifically are you suggesting did, or is currently doing the following?
 

There's the possible motive. Not the only reason forgeries are done but the most common: moolah, money.

Here is a situation in which someone is withholding or preventing access to what (if it were true) would be of immense importance to history and the world--solution to the JFK assassination after all these years--a chef was the master plotter of it, who would have thought it. Someone who owns and controls the datebook is, according to reports, not allowing normal vetting and examination for authenticity by the historians of America. 

A possible motive for not allowing vetting by experts--which is the expected thing to be done in cases such as this--would be that someone knows it is forged and that is why it is not wanted to be checked. Checking for forgery is not perfect--some forgeries can be so good they can beat experts--but in the majority of cases, forgery can and will be detected.  

Ask key questions when being presented with shiny new objects such as a Lafitte datebook proposing to be the missing solution to the JFK assassination after all these years: why is normal vetting for authenticity so impossible to accomplish in this case. Who is blocking that, and why.

 

Edited July 26, 2023 by Leslie Sharp