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[Ron Ecker]

FBI reports indicate Rosselli met twice in Miami with Jack Ruby in the months preceding the assassination.

Which FBI reports are these? Are they available online? Thanks,

Ron

[Ron Ecker]

* How do you get your rope loose from the top of the elevator shaft, when you're the last man down? I gather a rope was never found hanging in the shaft, or was there?

* What if the elevators were indeed on the 5th floor (as per Truly). The three African Americans were on the 5th floor and were observing the motorcade driving by, and were apparently the last to use at least one of the elevators, and according to eye witnesses the shots were fired from the 6th floor and therefore the "team" was on the 6th floor, how do you get past the elevators that are on the 5th? Is the shaft wide enough to sneak by?

From A.J. Weberman's Nodule 17:

HEMMING told this researcher: " . . . The elevator was locked on the seventh floor. It could be locked in position up there in the old days, it could be put in a safety position . . . To get off at the sixth floor, and we presume most of the shooting was done from the sixth floor, you run the elevator to the seventh floor. The torsion bar in the bottom is where you put your snap links in. Your ropes are all bundled up. All you have to do is raise the door, it doesn't have a safety on it, and slide up the cargo door and pull your string. Your ropes drop down to the bottom of the elevator shaft. It takes one second to do it. You're going with a double line so you can pull it through. You leave it in the bottom of the elevator shaft. . . . No one ever checked the bottom of the shaft.”

http://www.ajweberman.com/nodules/nodule17.htm

Ron

[James Richards]

(6) It is my understanding from weberman's nodules that in fact GPH and/or Hargraves did approach the FBI re the alleged solicitation to kill King. (Tim Gratz)

I can just see Hemming and or Hargraves knocking on the FBI's door doing their duty as honest citizens. Then again they visited Jim Garrison and straightened him out, and of course Oliver Stone was the recipient of their guidance.

GPH claimed that the infamous Raoul connected to the King assassination was one Robert Evan Johnson. This always felt like a deflection.

Then again ...?

James

[James Richards]

As far as scooting down elevator shafts go, we must not forget the information Richard Margeson voluntarily furnished to the FBI. Margeson spent some time with Lawrence Howard in the period leading up to the assassination.

Margeson talks about three men who visited Howard in Los Angeles. Rudy Hernandez, 'Slim' and an individual called 'Tex' who Margeson said gave his real name as Harvey Lee. All these men worked on a building renovation site where in the times when the boss was off-site, they held races to see who could get from the top to the bottom. Tex would always win as Margeson believed he rode the elevator cables down.

Margeson didn't believe Tex was the man shot by Jack Ruby but there was some resemblance. Could Tex have been Howard's fellow traveller William Seymour?

Was the cable riding exercise an attempt to create a possible escape route story for Oswald? Was plan A to find Oswald dead at the bottom of the shaft - an 'accident' while trying to escape?

Was Oswald supposed to go to the 6th floor so he could be dealt with? Did Oswald smell a rat and decide to stay on the second floor while he thought it through?

Lots of speculation here.

James

Edited March 19, 2005 by James Richards

[Bernice Moore]

* How do you get your rope loose from the top of the elevator shaft, when you're the last man down? I gather a rope was never found hanging in the shaft, or was there?

* What if the elevators were indeed on the 5th floor (as per Truly). The three African Americans were on the 5th floor and were observing the motorcade driving by, and were apparently the last to use at least one of the elevators, and according to eye witnesses the shots were fired from the 6th floor and therefore the "team" was on the 6th floor, how do you get past the elevators that are on the 5th? Is the shaft wide enough to sneak by?

From A.J. Weberman's Nodule 17:

HEMMING told this researcher: " . . . The elevator was locked on the seventh floor. It could be locked in position up there in the old days, it could be put in a safety position . . . To get off at the sixth floor, and we presume most of the shooting was done from the sixth floor, you run the elevator to the seventh floor. The torsion bar in the bottom is where you put your snap links in. Your ropes are all bundled up. All you have to do is raise the door, it doesn't have a safety on it, and slide up the cargo door and pull your string. Your ropes drop down to the bottom of the elevator shaft. It takes one second to do it. You're going with a double line so you can pull it through. You leave it in the bottom of the elevator shaft. . . . No one ever checked the bottom of the shaft.”

http://www.ajweberman.com/nodules/nodule17.htm

Ron

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

*****************

Hi Ron:

""HEMMING told this researcher: " . . . The elevator was locked on the seventh floor..""

The elevator only went to the sixth floor...?....there is much

more on this on the web.....

""The building was built in 1903 and is owned by the D. Harold Byrd

Associates. The school depository firm moved in in 1960 and took

a 15 year-lease. It was previously occupied by a wholesale grocery

firm. Cason said they remodled most of the building, except the

sixth floor where Oswald allegedly stalked his victim. On the first

floor is the general shipping area and the second is the company's

administrative offices. The third and fourth floors are occupied by

publishers' manufacturing representatives. The fifth floor and

basement are used for filling book orders. Cason said the sixth

floor is seldom used. He said an employe might go up there two or

three times a week. There are two freight elevators that go to the

sixth floor, but a passenger elevator only reaches the fourth floor.""

http://spot.acorn.net/jfkplace/08-Parks-36...s/first.reports

The Couch film indicates it took Baker no longer than 25 seconds to reach the front door.

http://ourworld-top.cs.com/mikegriffith1/id171.htm

Edited March 19, 2005 by Bernice Moore

[Tim Gratz]

Re James Post #18 re Robert Evan Johnson, I am quite sure GPH told me that Johnson was involved in picking up the money from Ramfis Trujillo and Johnny Abbes Garcia that was used to help fund the assassination. I did not put that in the newspaper article, not have I previously posted it here.

Edited March 19, 2005 by Tim Gratz

[Tim Gratz]

Re Bernice's post #20, even if the elevator went only to the sixth floor, it is possible Hemming was accurately told by someone the method of escape but got that detail wrong. The conspirators could have locked the elevator on the sixth floor then entered from the fifth floor, possibly? I suspect in the confusion following the assassination no one checked why the elevator was not working. Does anyone have information if a determination was made where the elevator was?

[Tim Gratz]

Re Bernice's post #20, even if the elevator went only to the sixth floor, it is possible Hemming was accurately told by someone the method of escape but got that detail wrong. The conspirators could have locked the elevator on the sixth floor then entered from the fifth floor, possibly? I suspect in the confusion following the assassination no one checked why the elevator was not working. Does anyone have information if a determination was made where the elevator was, and why it was not functioning? Also, is it possible that Oswald got to the second floor as fast as he did by taking the elevator, if he had locked it on the sixth floor? Presumably an elevator trip from sixth floor to second floor would be faster than the stairs. But this does not explain why the elevator was not working when Baker and Truly tried it.

[Ron Ecker]

Re James Post #18  re Robert Evan Johnson, I am quite sure GPH told me that Johnson was involved in picking up the money from Ramfis Trujillo and Johnny Abbes Garcia that was used to help fund the assassination.

According to Hemming in his HSCA deposition and at the 1996 Dallas conference, during the week of the JFK assassination Johnson went to Dallas from Canada with Arturo Espaillat, Trujillo's former chief of intelligence who had raised money from Canada and Europe to fund a French team in the assassination.

Ron

[Tim Gratz]

Ron wrote:

QUOTE(Tim Gratz @ Mar 18 2005, 04:20 AM)

FBI reports indicate Rosselli met twice in Miami with Jack Ruby in the months preceding the assassination.

Which FBI reports are these? Are they available online? Thanks,

Ron

Ron:

The fact that FBI reports indicated two meetings in Miami between Rosselli and Ruby is discussed in "Someone Would Have Talked". I do not have the book with me but from an Amazon search, try page 156.

Larry's book is one of the best, of course, but it does lack an index. I discovered you can go to Amazon and by using the "Search Inside the Book" feature, track all references to any name within the book. This is quite helpful.

I do not think anyone has yet located the actual FBI reports but they were reported to a reporter (Scott Malone as I recall) by an FBI agent.

[Tim Gratz]

Here is the third story we published on March 11, 2005:

The Strange Saga of Alexander Rorke

Our recent conversations with Gerry Hemming has caused us to revisit a story we covered in May 2004, when we met — at Little Palm Island, only a few miles from Hemming’s former Interpen base on No Name Key — with several women whose fathers had disappeared fighting America’s secret war against Castro in the early 1960s.

One of the women was Sherry Sullivan, today the owner of an art gallery in Maine. Sullivan’s father Geoffrey, a Korean War Air Force veteran, was a pilot for Alexander Rorke. She remembers her daredevil father flying his plane under the St. John River Bridge during a family vacation in Florida when she was five.

Sullivan and Rorke took off from the Fort Lauderdale airport in a rented blue-and-white twin-engined Beechcraft mid-afternoon on September 24, 1963, having filed a flight plan for Panama. That night the plane refueled in Cozmuzel, Mexico, after Sullivan filed a new flight plan with a destination of Honduras. It was the last time the plane and its occupants were seen.

Rorke, the wealthy son of a New York judge and son-in-law of the owner of Manhattan’s tony Stork Club, was as much of a swashbuckler than Hemming. Before his disappearance, Rorke had spent four years fighting Castro, his activities funded by anti-Castro governments. Rorke was involved in at least two attempts to assassinate Castro.

In 1959, on a mission funded by Johhny Abbes Garcia, intelligence chief of the Dominican Republic — who, according to Hemming, would later help fund Kennedy’s assassination — Rorke delivered eight men into Cuba by speedboat in one of the earliest missions to assassinate Castro (the CIA did not enter the “kill Castro” business until a year later when it outsourced the mission to the Mafia). Although the men succeeded in killing Castro’s driver and bodyguard, they missed Castro and were subsequently captured and executed.

Rorke’s second known attempt to assassinate Castro occurred in the fall of 1960. This attempt included his friend Frank Sturgis, who, like Hemming, had fought with the Castro forces. Shortly after Batista fled Cuba on New Years Day 1959, Sturgis gave the order for the mass execution of 59 followers of Batista’s notorious “hatchet-man” Rolando Masferrer, who fled to Key West the day after the fall of Batista. The Masferrer followers were buried near San Juan Hill. Castro later named Sturgis the government overseer of the gambling casinos. But Sturgis, like several other Americans who had fought with Castro, became disillusioned by Castro’s embrace of communism and he returned to the U.S., dedicated to overthrowing Castro.

Rorke and Sturgis knew a lady named Marita Lorenz. At the age of 20, Lorenz met Castro when he dined on board the cruise ship she was traveling in on a visit to Havana in February 1959. She fell for Castro and moved into his suite at the Havana Hilton. She accompanied him on his first visit to the U.S. in April 1959, and it was on that trip she became pregnant with Castro’s child. In September 1959, back in Cuba, Castro operatives drugged her and a Cuban doctor aborted her pregnancy. Upset over the forced abortion and still suffering medical complications from it, Lorenz returned to the U.S..

According to Lorenz, Rorke and Lorenz convinved her to return to Cuba and embrace Castro once more, but this time poison him while she was in his bed. They supplied her with the poison disguised in a bottle of cold cream. But she returned with her mission unfulfilled. She stated the poison had melted and become unuseable. Some thought, however, that she had either lost her nerve or been overcome by Castro’s charms. (The Lorenz story is told in a HBO movie, “My Little Assassin,” starring Joe Mantega as Fidel Castro. Frank Sturgis later gained notoriety as one of the Watergate burglars.)

After the two unsuccessful assassination attempts, Rorke engaged in numerous other missions against Castro and Cuba. Some involved dropping anti-Castro leaflets. Others involved sabotage operations. In April 1963, Rorke went on a mission to bomb a Cuban refinery but the bomb failed to explode. Shortly thereafter, U.S. Customs impounded Sullivan’s plane.

After his disappearance in late September, Rorke’s wealthy father-in-law announced at his Stork Club a substantial reward for information about the whereabouts of Rorke.

In early October 1963 prominent Florida attorney Ellis Rubin engaged Hemming and his No Name Key colleague Howard Davis to search for the missing plane and its occupants. Hemming, Davis and several others, including a representative of the company that had insured the missing plane, spent days searching the waters of the Florida straits and the Caribbean as well as the rugged terrain of several Central American countries in an unsuccessful effort to locate any sign of the missing plane or its occupants.

Hemming has offered a plausible explanation for the disappearance of Rorke and Sullivan. When they left Ft. Lauderdale there was a third occupant on the plane, a Cuban named Enrique Molina. Hemming is convinced Molina was a double agent for Castro. If so, Molina probably forced Sullivan to fly the plane from Cozmuzel to Cuba or to some other destination where they were turned over to Castro’s agents. If Hemming’s scenario is correct, it is likely that Rorke and Sullivan paid the ultimate penalty for their activities against Castro.

A strange addendum to this story: In 1980, a newsletter named Spotlight claimed that Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt was involved in the Kennedy assassination. Attorney Rubin, who had engaged Hemming on the search for Rorke and Sullivan, sued Liberty Lobby for libel on behalf of Hunt. Hunt won but the verdict was reversed on appeal. In the retrial, the Liberty Lobby engaged a new counsel, Mark Lane, author of “Rush to Judgment,” one of the early critiques of the Warren Commission. At the new trial, Lane introduced the testimony of Rita Lorenz, the same lady that Rorke and Sturgis had engaged in the 1960 plot to poison Castro. Lorenz told an incredible story: that on the day before the assassination of JFK, she left Miami for Dallas in a multi-car caravan. Among the other members of the caravan, she testified, were Lee Harvey Oswald, Frank Sturgis, Gerry Hemming and several Cubans. She further testified that in Dallas the group met with E. Howard Hunt as well as Jack Ruby. She claimed she flew back to Miami before the assassination.

Most assassination researchers dismiss Lorenz’s story. It is known that Oswald spent the night before the assassination at his wife’s home in Irving, Texas, for instance. Hemming was with a Miami newsman at the time of the assassination and Sturgis also claimed to be in Miami. Finally, Hemming famously once asked why anyone would take a woman along on a mission to assassinate the President, a comment that, while chauvinistic, has the ring of truth.

Hunt was never able to satisfactorily explain to the second jury his whereabouts on November 22nd and he lost the second trial.

Readers will recall that Attorney Rubin represented former Key West Police Chief Ray Peterson in his suit against the city and more recently was involved in the Elian Gonzales saga.

[Antti Hynonen]

Thanks Ron and Thanks Bernice. I do still find the elevator shaft descent a bit stretched. Either way, I do want to re-raise the question that why do none of the TSBD employees (roughly 100) say that they witnessed unfamiliar individuals inside the building, prior to the assassination, who did not work there? How is it possible that none of them saw any suspicious characters coming in or out of the building?

Eye witness R. Carr did.

Why did none of the Police officers in the immediate vicinity of the TSBD not try to stop the individuals clearly fleeing the building as seen by Carr and others?

Edited March 20, 2005 by Antti Hynonen

[Tim Gratz]

Antti:

I believe the killers were hiding in the building before the workers arrived.

[David G. Healy]

If the elevator was/were parked on the fifth floor, that means anyone that repelled down the shaft had to enter the shaft on the 4th floor.

David Healy

Edited March 21, 2005 by David G. Healy

[Bernice Moore]

Hi Tim:

""In late March of 1968, Hemming was in Los Angeles and was offered money to kill Martin Luther King, Jr., an offer he reported to the FBI. Within two weeks, King was murdered in Atlanta.""

I thought I had better point out this error in your article....

MLK was assassinated in Memphis....not Atlanta ..

B