Nobody will ever solve this crime to the satisfaction of any court. The evidence that could have contributed to a logical conclusion was selectively destroyed, or was never collected. The conclusion of the Warren Commission was decided long before the investigation began; an investigation conducted in reverse. Usually, an investigative body collects all the information and comes to a conclusion based upon that information. The Warren Commission, at the direction of J. Edgar Hoover, began with a conclusion and proceeded to collect only the information that would support it. Information and evidence to the contrary was either ignored, avoided, or destroyed.

I studied this subject for several years. My interest was sparked by Nigel Turner’s mini series "The Men Who Killed Kennedy." Turner’s evidence and conclusions were good, but inaccurate. His conclusions have never been proven to be valid. I then read a book "Mortal Error" which suggested that a Secret Service agent slipped and fell in the "Queen Mary" Cadillac following the presidential limousine and accidentally discharged an AR15 round which struck the president. The evidence was magnificently detailed and very probable; unfortunately, one of the films taken at the scene ultimately disproved the theory.

After several more crackpot theories, including the famous "the shooter is in the storm drain" theory, and one that said the shooter was actually in the trunk of the presidential limousine, I decided to analyze this case with logic and reason, something most investigators avoided. The evidence is clear; the Warren Commission Report is a fraud. The only evidence required to prove this is the report itself. Its own content proves that its conclusion is impossible.

The Warren Commission Report is an 888 page synopsis of the 26 volumes of information collected and reviewed by the commission, chaired by Chief Justice Earl Warren. This information consists of close to a million pages of reports and other junk designed to thwart justice. Close to 200 key people who could have contributed to the case were never interviewed. Brain tissue slides and other evidence critical to the investigation just disappeared.

Assassination 101 is ballistics and trajectory. Take a ruler, analyze the known distances, the known position of the president, and Oswald’s known position combined with the height of the Texas School Book Depository Building and the angle of the pavement. These are all facts chiseled in stone; they cannot be disputed. Compare them to the entry and exit wounds found on Kennedy’s body, and you’ll find that the angles are all off. Oswald was firing from the right rear (slight angle) or right to left at about a 16 degree downward angle, factoring in the pavement angle. The wound pattern is left to right, with an angle of about 11 degrees. Oswald could not have made this shot, period. Several computer analyses conducted by dubious parties have magically made the shot possible. They do this by suggesting that Kennedy's head was positioned at an absurd angle. Not true; the exact position is shown in the Zapruder film at frame 312 and cannot be disputed.

One analysis is the basis of Gerald Posner’s "Case Closed" book, which was thoroughly discredited by the greatest assassination expert of all time, Harold Weisberg, now deceased. Posner’s case is based upon a mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald, in which the evidence was presented to a law school jury. They failed to "convict." Posner failed to "mention" this in his book. It is odd that Posner’s book, simply a mirror of the Warren Report, was immediately published while anti Warren theorists had a rough time. Weisberg was so upset by Posner’s book that he wrote his own book, "Case Open" in which he detailed Posner’s mistakes and lies. Posner claimed to have read all the material Weisberg had, in addition to all the Warren Commission information, in an amount of time that was just ridiculously impossible.

The number of shots fired is still in dispute, although there is physical evidence that suggests as many as 9. Most critics say Oswald could not have fired 3 shots in the allotted time of approximately six seconds; not true. In "Mortal Error," the recreation staged by CBS News is detailed. Several experts duplicated the required 3 shots easily in the allotted time with a similar weapon. What Oswald actually hit is another question. Here’s a rundown of what the evidence suggests in no particular order:

Oswald’s first shot hit the pavement behind the presidential limousine. Five witnesses saw something resembling a firecracker "skipping along the ground" behind the limousine at this time. Kennedy immediately reacted, stating "My God, I am hit." Source for this is Bobby Donnelly, head of Kennedy’s security detail, who was sitting in front of him in the limousine. Kennedy had indeed been hit; later evidence found by a Dr. Fisher in 1968 revealed a round  metal fragment imbedded in the fleshy part of Kennedy’s scalp near the hair line and two ragged burn holes in his suit coat lapel, caused by ricochet fragments. 

Oswald’s second shot missed completely, going down range and striking the curb near the triple underpass. Here, James Tague was struck on the cheek by ricochet fragments. The curbing was mysteriously patched by the next morning, and after being cut out now, resides in the National Archives. It has been analyzed and the repair has been verified. Sound Familiar? Tague later had all his cameras and film stolen when he went on vacation. Tague, cheek bleeding, had his picture published in a Dallas newspaper. 

A third shot struck the chrome strip over the limousine’s windshield on the inside. (photo is in the Warren Report) There is an obvious bullet hole near the driver’s side. There is also a crack in the windshield, on the inside. 

One shot struck Kennedy in the upper back, exiting his throat and nicking his tie. This is the beginning of Arlen Specter’s magic bullet theory, which falls apart quickly. This one shot caused enough spinal trauma to cause death according to some experts. The evidence suggests that the bullet transited the president’s body and hit nothing else.

The next shot hit Texas Governor John Connally in the back, exited his chest breaking his fifth rib, and disappeared. Proof that these were separate shots is provided by the Zapruder film and Connally’s  testimony. There is a lag of over one second between the time Kennedy is struck and when Connally is struck. Oswald had a grudge against Connally who, as Secretary of the Navy, refused to upgrade Oswald’s undesirable discharge when petitioned to do so. Letters show that Oswald actually liked JFK.

Another shot hit Connally in the wrist, shattering bone, and supposedly entered his thigh. A bullet (the magic bullet) was recovered by Parkland Hospital attendant Darrell Tomlinson on a basically unidentified gurney that supposedly held Connally when he was brought in. The gurney was empty in an elevator at the time of the discovery. Interestingly enough, more lead was taken from Connally than was missing from the magic bullet. Even more lead remained in his arm to his death; his wife refused to allow it to be removed at his autopsy.

Two shots seemingly hit Kennedy in the head at the same time. There is "reference black" over his temple in the autopsy photos; this is something photographers use to black out something they don’t want you to see. Later release of skull fragments gave way to the lie, with crenellation (marks made by a bullet) showed an entry wound at the temple. Most autopsy witnesses state that the back of Kennedy’s head was blown out as well as the area above the right ear. There is an entrance wound in the flap of skin at the back of the head. This indicates more than one shot.

There is a bullet scar on a storm drain at the end of Dealy Plaza by the Triple Underpass that lines up perfectly with the Dallas County Records Building. Witness John Martin found it. A 30.06 caliber shell casing made in 1953 was also found on the roof of the records Building by a maintenance man named Morgan in 1975. In addition, an FBI evidence envelope released in 1996 indicated that a  7.65 mm rifle shell had been found in Dealey Plaza sometime between 11/22/63 and 12/2/63. (Empty, of course.)

One of the most interesting facts uncovered in the assassination of President Kennedy was the presence of Malcolm Wallace’s fingerprint on one of the boxes Lee Oswald hid behind. Wallace, a long time friend of LBJ, has been characterized as LBJ’s personal hit man. Wallace was the convicted murderer of John Douglas Kinser, a professional golfer who had been dating then Senator Lyndon B. Johnson's sister, Josefa Johnson, who was known to have had a drug and alcohol problem. The murder had taken place on October 22, 1951, supposedly after Kinser had approached Johnson for money in return for silence about things Josepha had told him about Lyndon and his activities. 

Wallace shot Doug Kinser five times with a .25 caliber automatic handgun. When the case came to trial in the 98th District Court of Travis County before Judge Charles O. Betts, Wallace was represented by Lyndon Johnson's longtime personal lawyer, John Cofer. On March 27, 1952, Wallace was convicted of "murder with malice aforethought" -- murder in the first degree -- for which he received a five year suspended sentence. He walked away essentially a free man. Several other murders of Johnson associates, including his sister Josepha in 1961, were attributed to Wallace.

In 1961, State Agricultural Stabilization and Conservation official Henry Marshall was investigating a broad series of fraudulent government subsidies allotted to Billie Sol Estes, a close personal friend of Lyndon B. Johnson. Marshall had uncovered a paper trail that was leading him closer and closer to Johnson himself. On June 3, 1961, Mac Wallace knocked Henry Marshall unconscious with a blunt object, fed the unconscious man carbon monoxide from a hose attached to Wallace's pickup truck, then shot him five times with a .22 caliber rifle and dumped him in a remote corner of Marshall's farm near Franklin, Texas. Justice of the Peace Lee Farmer pronounced the death a suicide and ordered Marshall buried without an autopsy -- over the protests of Marshall's widow. The verdict remained unchanged until 1984, when Billie Sol Estes, under a grant of immunity, told a grand jury that Wallace had been Marshall's killer, and that the order came from Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson through White House aide Cliff Carter. Based on Estes' testimony and supporting evidence, the grand jury changed the earlier ruling of suicide to murder. Mac Wallace could not be indicted; he died in an automobile accident in Pittsburgh, Texas, on January 7, 1971.

On December 25, 1961, LBJ's sister Josefa Johnson was found dead in bed at her Fredericksburg, Texas home at 3:15 am. The cause of death was stated to be a brain hemorrhage. Josefa Johnson had returned home at 11:45 pm from a Christmas party at Lyndon Johnson's ranch. There was no autopsy and no inquest; the death certificate was executed by a doctor who was not present to examine the deceased. Ms. Johnson was embalmed on Christmas Day and buried on December 26th (Walt Brown, "The Sordid Story of Mac Wallace," *JFK/Deep Politics Quarterly,* July 1998).

A Pecos doctor, John Dunn, picked up Henry Marshall's investigation. Despite filing his report on Johnson and Estes with numerous law enforcement agencies and US congressmen and senators, Dunn could not convince a single press outlet to report his findings, and no one in Washington would take any action. Out of desperation, Dunn and an associate bought their own newspaper, the Pecos Independent and Enterprise, and began running the Johnson-Estes stories on February 12, 1962. A month later, Billie Sol Estes was in jail; he would receive a light sentence with the help of Johnson's ever helpful John Cofer. The Senate Investigations Subcommittee chaired by John McClellan conducted a brief and superficial series of hearings that swiftly exonerated Johnson of wrongdoing without any substantial investigation. Dr. John Dunn was soon disbarred from practicing medicine and charged with malpractice and claims that he had taken advantage of a patient, a young black woman, all of which Dunn vigorously denied.

On the night of April 4, 1962, at the western end of Texas, a ranch man came upon the body of George Krutilek near the town of Clint, slumped in his car with a hose from his exhaust stuck in the window. He had been dead for several days, and the El Paso County pathologist, Dr. Frederick Bornstein, held that he certainly did not die from carbon monoxide poisoning (San Angelo *Standard Times,* April 5, 1962). Krutilek was a forty nine year old CPA who had undergone secret grilling by FBI agents on April 2, the day after Billie Sol Estes' arrest. . . . Krutilek had worked for Estes and had been the recipient of his favors, but he was never seen or heard of again after the FBI grilling until his badly decomposed body was found.

Harold Eugene Orr was the president of the Superior Manufacturing Company of Amarillo, Texas when he was indicted for his role in Estes' fraudulent enterprises, and sentenced to a ten year prison term. On February 28, 1964, just before Orr was to begin his prison term, he was found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning in his garage. It was ruled an accidental death. A few weeks later, Howard Pratt, the Chicago office manager of Commercial Solvents, a supplier of farm products to Billie Sol Estes, was also found dead in his car, a victim of carbon monoxide poisoning. This strange series of carbon monoxide deaths was discussed in an Amarillo Globe-Times article of March 26, 1964, by reporter Clyde Walters.

Coleman Wade was a building contractor out of Altus, Oklahoma, who had contracted with Billie Sol Estes for many of Estes' storage facilities. In early 1963, Wade was flying home from Pecos, Texas, in his private plane when the craft went down in the area of Kermit, Texas, its occupants instantly killed. Government investigators swept in and instead of expeditiously cleaning up the wreckage in their routine way, kept the area roped off for days.

When Lyndon Johnson's friend, Mayor Tom Miller of Austin, died, Johnson flew down for the funeral. During his return flight, he made an unscheduled stop in Midland, Texas, where Billie Sol Estes and an unidentified lawyer were quietly escorted on board. The men met for an hour while the plane was guarded by Secret Service men. When reports of this secret meeting leaked out from eyewitnesses, an investigator tried to obtain the flight records for the Midland airport. He found the records were sealed by government order.

A decade after LBJ's death, a friend of Estes, a federal marshal, talked Estes into coming forward with what he knew about Henry Marshall's death. Then on August 9, 1984, following Billie Sol Estes' grand jury testimony regarding Mac Wallace's murder of Henry Marshall, Estes' attorney, Douglas Caddy sent a letter to Stephen S. Trott, Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division, of the US Department of Justice. The letter reads: Dear Mr. Trott: My client, Mr. Estes, has authorized me to make this reply to your letter of May 29, 1984. Mr. Estes was a member of a four member group headed by Lyndon Johnson, which committed criminal acts in Texas in the 1960s. The other two, besides Mr. Estes and LBJ, were White House aide Cliff Carter and Mac Wallace. Mr. Estes is willing to disclose his knowledge concerning the following criminal offenses: 1. Murders 1. The killing of Henry Marshall 2. The killing of George Krutilek 3. The killing of Ike Rogers and his secretary 4. The killing of Harold Orr 5. The killing of Coleman Wade 6. The killing of Josefa Johnson 7. The killing of John Kinser 8. The killing of President J. F. Kennedy.

Mr. Estes is willing to testify that LBJ ordered these killings, and that he transmitted his orders through Cliff Carter to Mac Wallace, who executed the murders. In the cases of murders nos. 1-7, Mr. Estes' knowledge of the precise details concerning the way the murders were executed stems from conversations he had shortly after each event with Cliff Carter and Mac Wallace. In addition, a short time after Mr. Estes was released from prison in 1971, he met with Cliff Carter and they reminisced about what had occurred in the past, including the murders.

During their conversation, Carter orally compiled a list of 17 murders which had been committed, some of which Mr. Estes was unfamiliar with. A living witness was present at that meeting and should be willing to testify about it. He is Kyle Brown, recently of Houston and now living in Brady, Texas. It continues for several more pages, detailing many other crimes Estes had knowledge of, including illegal cotton allotments and payoffs. Estes' testimony was conditional on certain demands, including immunity from prosecution, a full pardon, and absolution of past income tax debts. Talks between the Justice Department and Billie Sol Estes broke off later in the year.

On June 19, 1992, US Marshall Clint Peoples told a friend of his that he had documentary evidence that Mac Wallace was one of the shooters in Dealey Plaza. On June 23rd, Peoples, a former Texas Ranger and friend of Henry Marshall, was killed in a mysterious one car automobile accident in Texas. Investigator Harrison Livingstone spoke to Kyle Brown, named as a witness in the above letter, at length in 1993, and Brown backed up everything Livingstone had heard. Kyle Brown, to this day, is one of Billie Sol Estes' closest friends. On March 12, 1998, a 1951 fingerprint of Malcolm "Mac" Wallace was positively matched with a copy of a fingerprint labeled "Unknown," a fresh print lifted on November 22, 1963, from a carton by the southeast sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository. This carton was labeled "Box A," and also contained several fingerprints identified as those of Lee Harvey Oswald.

The identification was made by A. Nathan Darby, a Certified Latent Print Examiner with several decades experience. Mr. Darby is a member of the International Association of Identifiers, and was chosen to help design the Eastman Kodak Miracode System of transmitting fingerprints between law enforcement agencies. Mr. Darby signed a sworn, notarized affidavit stating that he was able to affirm a 14 point match between the "Unknown" fingerprint and the "blind" print card submitted to him, which was the 1951 print of Mac Wallace. US law requires a 12 point match for legal identification; Darby's match is more conclusive than the legal minimum. As cardboard does not retain fingerprints for long, it is certain that Malcolm E. Wallace left his fingerprint on "Box A" on the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository early on November 22, 1963.

The FBI currently has custody of the Mac Wallace fingerprint, Nathan Darby's sworn affidavit, and several hundred pages of corroborative evidence developed by a Texas research group which is currently remaining anonymous. Brown has received permission from the group to release the name of one eyewitness to some of the covert business dealings between Lyndon B. Johnson and members of the assassination plot. This is Barr McClellan of Houston, Texas, one time attorney for the law firm led by Ed Clark, which had represented Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960s.

Biographer Robert A. Caro, author of two volumes to date in the groundbreaking series The Years of Lyndon Johnson writes: "Because Lyndon Johnson would have been only sixty-seven years old, when, in 1975, I began my research on his life, most of his contemporaries were still alive. This made it possible to find out what he was like while he was growing up from the best possible sources: those who grew up with him. And it also makes it possible to clear away the misinformation that has surrounded the early life of Lyndon Johnson. "The extent of this misinformation, the reason it exists, and the importance of clearing it away, so that the character of our thirty sixth President will become clear, became evident to me while researching his years at college.

The articles and biographies which have dealt with these years have in general portrayed Johnson as a popular, even charismatic, campus figure. The oral histories of his classmates collected by the Lyndon Johnson library portray him in the same light. In the early stages of my research, I had no reason to think there was anything more to the story. Indeed, when one of the first of his classmates whom I interviewed, Henry Kyle, told me a very different story, I believed that because Kyle had been defeated by Johnson in a number of campus encounters, I was hearing only a prejudiced account by an embittered man, and did not even bother typing up my notes of the interview. "Then, however, I began to interview other classmates. . . . When I found them, I was told the old anecdotes that had become part of the Lyndon Johnson myth. But over and over again, the man or woman I was interviewing would tell me that these anecdotes were not the whole story. When I asked for the rest of it, they wouldn't tell it.

A man named Vernon Whiteside could have told me, they said, but, they said, they had heard that Vernon Whiteside was dead. "One day, however, I phoned Horace Richards, a Johnson classmate who lived in Corpus Christi, to arrange to drive down from Austin to see him. Richards said that there was indeed a great deal more to the story of Lyndon Johnson at college than had been told, but that he wouldn't tell me unless Vernon Whiteside would too. But Whiteside was dead, I said. "Hell, no," Richards said. "He's not dead. He was here visiting me just last week. "

I traced Mr. Whiteside to a mobile home court in Highland Beach, Florida and flew there to see him, and heard for the first time many of the character revealing episodes of Lyndon Johnson's years at San Marcos at which the other classmates had hinted. And when I returned to these classmates, they confirmed Whiteside's account; Richards himself added many details. And now they told additional stories, not at all like the ones they had told before. The portrait of Lyndon Johnson at San Marcos that finally emerged was very different from the one previously sketched.

"The experience was repeated again and again during the seven years spent on this book. Of the hundreds of persons interviewed, scores had never been interviewed before, and the information these persons have provided -- in some cases even though they were quite worried about providing it -- has helped form a portrait of Lyndon Johnson substantially different from all previous portraits" (Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, 769-70).

This passage demonstrates the power that Lyndon Baines Johnson wielded over people; even people who hadn't seen him in fifty years; even people who knew nothing of him but his childhood and teen years -- people who knew no secrets of state, had no political ammunition, knew little more than gossip; people who continued to fear him and "his people" even after Lyndon Baines Johnson, in fact, was dead. Caro continues: "Prior to his entrance into campus politics at San Marcos, 'no one,' as another student recalled, 'cared about campus politics.' Elections -- for class offices or the Student Council -- were casual affairs. But Johnson saw in those elections an opportunity to obtain a measure of control, small but pivotal, over the fate of some of his fellow students.

At this 'poor boys' school,' a diploma was for many students the only hope of escape from a life of poverty and brutal physical toil on their families' impoverished ranches and farms, and in the Depression, campus jobs, with their tiny cash stipends, represented the only means by which these young men could stay in school and obtain their diplomas. Johnson saw a method by which the victors in campus politics could obtain authority to dispense those jobs. And to obtain this power that no one else had focused on, he did what no one else on the sleepy campus had done: he created, out of a small social club, a disciplined and secret political organization. And when because of his personal unpopularity, the club could not. despite his organizing, win elections, he taught unsophisticated farm boys how to steal elections (and how to win them by other methods: 'blackmailing' a popular rival woman candidate out of a race over a meaningless indiscretion, for example; 'things we would never have dreamt of if it hadn't been for Lyndon').

College Hill's pattern was repeated on Capitol Hill in 1933 and 1934. The 'Little Congress' of congressional aides was a social organization. But Lyndon Johnson saw in its presidency a means of entree to men of power. Again there were repeated complaints, this time from fellow Little Congress members, that he had 'stolen' elections ('Everyone said it: "In that last election that damn Lyndon Johnson stole some votes again"').

When, in 1933 and 1934, Johnson was accused of stuffing a ballot box, he was not yet represented by Abe Fortas, and his accusers succeeded in accomplishing what Fortas prevented Johnson's 1948 accusers from accomplishing: opening the ballot box. When the Little Congress box was opened, it was found that the accusations against Johnson were true. Again, as in college, what he had done was unprecedented: no one had ever stuffed a Little Congress ballot box before. (And, perhaps no one would ever stuff one again, for after his departure the organization quickly reverted to its easygoing social role; 'My God, who would cheat to win the presidency of something like the Little Congress?')

In his first campaign for the Senate, he stole thousands of votes, and when they proved insufficient ('He ['Pappy' O'Daniel] stole more votes than we did, that's all'), his reaction was to try to steal still more, and his failure in this attempt was due only to an irredeemable tactical error, not to any change in the pattern . . . at each previous stage of his career, then, Johnson's election tactics had made clear not only a hunger for power but a willingness to take (within the context of American politics, of course; the coups and assassinations that characterize other countries' politics were not and never would be included in his calculations) whatever political steps would be necessary to satisfy that hunger. Over and over again, he had stretched the rules of the game to their breaking point and then had broken them, pushing deeper into the ethical and legal no man's land beyond.

Now, in 1948, he was operating beyond the loosest boundaries of prevailing custom and political morality. What had been demonstrated before was now underlined in the strongest terms: in the context of the politics that was his life, Lyndon Johnson would do whatever was necessary to win. "Even in terms of the most elastic political morality -- the political morality of 1940s Texas -- his methods were amoral" (Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent.) Lyndon Johnson could not have acted without the assistance of his best friend, the most powerful law enforcement agent in the world, J. Edgar Hoover, Director of the FBI.

An operation such as this could not be run without enormous cash reserves, businesses in which to launder funds and transmit orders, to set up trusts for beneficiaries at a later date; the kind of money that H. L. Hunt had; the kind of money that Clint Murchison had. In 1963, oilman H. L. Hunt was literally one of the richest men in world, estimated to be worth five billion dollars. H. L. Hunt had the kind of money that could buy trucks, jeeps, guns, and explosives for the Minutemen and the John Birch Society; could fund a radio station making daily broadcasts interpreting the day's news in light of the terrible "Communist threat" in the inner corridors of Washington; could build munitions plants and helicopter factories just in case a war should suddenly erupt; could keep active men with valuable connections such as Sergio Arcacha Smith and Jack Ruby on the payroll.

Hunt and his sons had a private intelligence agency up and running to combat the Communist threat, having hired intelligence agents away from their government positions to charge for their loyalties by the hour. Their man in charge was Paul Rothermel, an ex FBI agent presiding over a host of ex FBI agents, and ex CIA assets could also be counted on to keep their mouths shut. Hunt's top aide for many years, John Curington, eventually left the organization, fed up playing cops and robbers without a badge. He told Harrison Livingstone that not only was Lamar Hunt chatting with Ruby on November 21st, but shortly after Oswald's arrest, H. L. himself requested that Curington personally take a stroll over to DPD headquarters to see how tight security was around the suspect.

He added that Curington should make a point to check out the elevators they were using to transport the prisoner. Curington strode into the building, rang for the elevator, and when the doors opened he found himself face to face with Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald's police escort introduced the two men (Livingstone, Killing the Truth). His employer was pleased to learn that security around the prisoner was rather lax. Curington saw Marina Oswald depart from a private meeting with H. L. Hunt one evening in December 1963. "Hunt asked me to lock everything up and prevent anyone from coming upstairs on the elevator.

As I waited, an elevator came down and Marina Oswald came out of it, left the building, and got into a waiting car. I'm absolutely sure it was her." (Livingstone). Marina first denied the story, but has conceded that she met with many people she didn't know after the assassination. Eventually, the Hunt "security" agency became so intricate that the billionaire's billionaire son, Nelson Bunker Hunt, would feel the need to institute his own counterintelligence program to weed out intruders and turncoats; it would cost him.

Paul Rothermel, the former G-man, went public with incredible charges against the younger Hunt, whom, Rothermel charged, asked him to help start a private army to be called the American Volunteer Group (AVG), drawn from the ranks of General Edwin A. Walker's John Bircher brigade. Hunt's goal was a top secret paramilitary based in southern California that could be called upon to act when Communists and liberals got too pushy.

Like father, like son; just before November 22, 1963, H. L. Hunt told a gathering of compatriots that the only way to get Communists like the Kennedy brothers out of office is to "shoot 'em out." When Rothermel refused to participate, he found himself spied upon and his phone tapped. Nelson Bunker Hunt would eventually plead guilty "to a misdemeanor stemming from a massive wiretapping conspiracy in which he'd hired a Houston detective agency to eavesdrop upon his own security force, a force composed largely of former FBI agents" (Jim Hougan, Spooks, 74-75). Hunt denied the AVG charge, however, journalist Peter Noyes confirmed that the AVG was up and running for at least a brief period of time. His sources were a number of active California Minutemen, a group which had been tapped by the Hunts for recruits, but who found the Hunts a bit extreme even for their taste (Hougan, 75).

H. L. Hunt once wrote a novel called Alpaca, about a utopian democracy that based citizenship rights on property ownership and educational qualifications. (Hunt dropped out of school in the sixth grade.) Elections in this best of all possible worlds were determined by the amount of taxes one paid; the more you pay, the more votes you get. A source requesting anonymity told Harry Livingstone, "H. L. had every lawyer in Dallas doing something for him. He'd give them all a little piece of the pie, and nobody could find a lawyer big enough to stand up to him." Madeleine Brown - Lyndon B. Johnson's longtime mistress and mother of his illegitimate son Steven, as well as a personal friend of the Hunts for a number of years -- said, "If they didn't play his game, they went in and took it. They pulled no punches. The had no morals. They had no rules. It was strictly power. They were absolutely ruthless" (Livingstone, 496-7).

Madeleine has come to regret merely standing by and watching. John Curington told Livingstone that H. L. Hunt had a personal line to Lyndon Johnson through their mutual friend Boothe Mooney (Livingstone, 500). If Hunt and LBJ were birds of a feather, Johnson also flocked around his close friend J. Edgar Hoover's generous benefactors, the family of oil baron Clint Murchison. Murchison is now well known to have hosted the FBI director for any number of paid vacations both to his home and private race track as well as other glamorous jaunts, often hobnobbing with the gangsters the FBI would presumably be prosecuting were they not devoting all their manpower to fighting the Red Menace.

Hoover had been arguably the most powerful man in Washington for decades, and it was common knowledge that JFK was going to put him out to pasture following the 1964 election, just as Kennedy was going to do to Lyndon. Johnson’s scandalous wheeling and dealing with Bobby Baker from his Senate days were catching up with him even faster than the Billy Sol Estes affair, and it would bring the whole Democratic party down with it if the key players weren't thrown overboard. Estes and to a lesser degree Johnson were the primary benefactors of their doings, while everyone on Capitol Hill knew Bobby Baker, and every lawyer, lobbyist, and lawmaker wanted a piece of the action -- and Bobby was LBJ's boy. The dealings had been too many to keep quiet with a quick "Texas suicide." LBJ wasn't just looking at the end of his political career; he was looking at hard time.

Within 24 hours of the assassination, Lyndon Johnson called Captain Will Fritz, chief of the Homicide Bureau of the DPD, and personally informed him he had his man in custody and the investigation was over. Johnson aide Cliff Carter phoned the same message to Texas DA Waggoner Carr, who was none too pleased to receive it. When Lee Harvey Oswald lay dying in Parkland Hospital on November 24, 1963, Dr. Charles Crenshaw was astonished to pick up a phone call and find himself talking to the President of the United States, who said he wanted a confession from Oswald; he didn't get it. Johnson created the Warren Commission, which answered only to him, thereby preempting the numerous proposed investigations in Texas and on Capitol Hill.

Then Johnson locked up as much of the evidence as he could, all with the help of J. Edgar Hoover, who buried or destroyed any evidence that threatened to upset the apple cart; the Hunts and Murchisons and their enormous cash and influence, and certain rogue elements of the intelligence community who resented Kennedy for both his foreign policy and his attempts to curb the CIA's massive and wholly unconstitutional power. The intelligence community has long hidden in the shadows of the assassination, between the more obvious suspects as well as the "false sponsors" they intentionally drew into the operation to shield themselves -- Castro, the anti-Castro Cubans, the Mob.

That was their most important contribution; though they routinely interfaced with the Texans and undoubtedly played a role in the events of Dealey Plaza, their most valuable asset was the one which was needed most: the unfathomed capability of certain of their ranks to confuse and deceive.

More than getaway planes and unmarked cars, the plotters needed smoke and mirrors to blind and mislead, to confuse and disorient. They had planned for such a need; they had masters of propaganda at key points, allies in the press, and for their greatest trick, a certain "Harvey" rabbit to produce from a hat and then make disappear on cue. It may be pure conjecture, but given Hunt's organizational ties and unholy alliances, his personal spies and private law, one wonders if it doesn't strain credulity to the breaking point to think there wasn't someone else we know to have been in Dallas who couldn't have somehow stumbled into this snake pit; someone who Hunt's chief staff assistant John Curington admitted he "had run across . . . before the assassination" (Dick Russell, "The Man Who Knew Too Much,* 317).

It was John Curington who turned over a previously unknown slip of paper to the FBI, a brief note the handwriting of which has been authenticated by numerous independent handwriting analysts. The only part of the note disputed is the signature, which appears to be misspelled. But the purported author was not immune to misspelling his own name, even on a very deliberately executed, typewritten document (CE 908, 18 H 97); see Reitzes, "Alik and Marina."

"Nov. 8, 1963; Dear Mr. Hunt, I would like information concerding [sic] my position. I am asking only for information. I am suggesting that we discuss the matter fully before any steps are taken by me or anyone else. Thank You, Lee Harvy [sic] Oswald*

Well, there’s your country and its power structure. Do you think it’s changed any in the last 40 years? Don’t bet on it. Personally, I believe that there were three shooters; Roscoe "Rock" White, Oswald, and a Texas Ranger who was briefly identified. This man was supposedly seen coming down from the roof of the Dallas County Records Building carrying a rifle. Since the witnesses who saw him were unidentified and could not later be found, his identity was pulled. The other conspiracy theories are moot; most of them attempt to identify who may have been behind the murder, not the shooters themselves. Kennedy had many enemies, from the oil industry to the mafia to the CIA to the FBI. Any one of them or all of them could have conspired to just look the other way, or to actively mess up the investigation and make sure it went nowhere. In the end, the American people are the losers, as always. I guess we never really counted for anything anyway.