INTERVIEW WITH HISTORY

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INTERVIEW WITH HISTORY
Pamela J. Ray
The JFK Assassination
With James E. Files
The Grassy Knoll Shooter

THE GRASSY KNOLL SHOOTER CONFESSES his front-on shot at John Kennedy. This is a 450-page book and ill-proofread, barely edited if at all, but the storyline is fascinating to say the least. There have of course been thousands of books and articles about this but this one despite its sloppiness seems to achieve the most credibility. Perhaps the very unkempt nature of the script adds to that convincing evaluation, cacography, punctuation lapses, even run-on sentences. It’s so badly done it must be true. Moreover, no one else has ever come forward to admit to the crime of the century though some unverified deathbed versions exist as well as non-risk theorems and personal accounts, none of which corroborate. Jim Files’ comes closest.
This is a series of letters, conversations, phone calls all arranged as a lengthy interview presented haphazardly yet does tend to gain chronology if a bit repetitively. James Files is a prisoner as one might imagine, a genuine bad guy but with personality and wit, raised on the wrong side of the tracks and all that. At age 21 he became a hit man for the Chicago mob. After Vietnam it was a natural career move.
Listen, right up front, Lee Harvey Oswald had nothing to do with the hit. He didn’t even fire a shot. Oswald was a patsy pure and simple. Whodunnit? A whole bunch of guys. It was such an open secret, the whole planning and executing, that it really was only due to the lack of real investigative journalism and the Warren Report that truth remained hidden for so long. It was a super conspiracy involving hundreds if not thousands of persons. But now we seem to have the one guy who might actually be responsible for the fatal shot. You’d be amazed at the personalities that were there in Dallas at that time. Dick Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, the CIA, the FBI in general, Chicago gangsters, William F. Buckley, George H W Bush, a host of fire-chasers – those so-called fire-starters that hang around to see their own fireworks, fake CIA officials, three supposed tramps as yet unidentified, Jack Ruby was spotted on site that fateful day, Allen and John Foster Dulles, Arlen Specter, Prescott Bush, J. Edgar Hoover, Jimmy Hoffa, KGB members, Nikita Krushchev, Madam Nhu Diem and family, Santos Trafficante of Cuba, Meyer Lansky, Clay Shaw, E. Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis of Watergate infamy, Sam Giancano and other mob bosses, many tycoons like H. L. Hunt, Joe Kennedy Sr., and even a supposed double of Oswald. Rumor or fact, there were scores more of notables and mysterious characters alike reportedly on the scene. Apart from the attraction of seeing the president it appears in retrospect that most were there to see the real action.
This guy, this gangster, James Files, was recruited to join in separately though with one other shooter comrade, the other shooters – yes there were several isolated phalanges working individually from the others – being stationed at the various vantage points of trajectory available. According to Jim Fines he got in the deadly if not first shot since he was a sharpshooter from Vietnam days and a squirrel hunting kid in Alabama before that. He specialized in hitting moving targets. This is all fascinating stuff for someone who’s at most an armchair adventurer whose meanest weapons were cap guns, peashooters and water pistols 55-70 years ago and a year in military school at which I carried a licorice stick clarinet primed for stimulating action, a loaded guitar thereafter. But Jimmie Files was the real thing, a real hit man. As he says, you didn’t talk about killing someone, you just did it and then still didn’t talk about it. He says he was paid $30,000 for the Kennedy shot and one other execution of lesser consequence though it’s not clear if the money was all from organized crime or partial CIA funding. The line gets blurred since they’re in the same business.
This is all documented fairly replete in a nonfiction narrative and naturally one wonders at the consequences for the shooter. Well, he’s doing time for shooting a cop which he didn’t actually shoot, his friend having wounded the cop. Two plainclothes cops rammed their car one night and started shooting at them but the cops were in an unmarked vehicle and proffered no words of warning or arrest, just started shooting. They were evidently looking for CIA bounty money because there had been two former attempts on Jim Files’ life. Why? The FBI had fingered him as having been at the Kennedy death scene. That was why Jack Ruby took Oswald out of the picture, to avoid Oswald revealing Files and others’ names, Ruby being a Chicago transplant of nefarious origins and Files having interacted with Oswald briefly in Louisiana and Texas. So the FBI did it anyway. But Jim Files won’t reveal any other names and the fed’s not about to let him out unless he snitches, some kind of honor system one might extrapolate. There must be some reason that Pamela’s so gone on him and the Chicago crime syndicate seems to back him still, no contracts or anything of that sort but for the CIA or other government agencies. Crime and law work together to varying degrees but those doing double or triple agent duty sometimes get caught in the middle and James Files was working both sides of the street though everybody knew it. But it’s not for Kennedy’s murder he’s wanted, imprisoned, or potentially indicted, it’s for sole sake of who he might turn in to save his own skin, which he won’t so he remains in prison. He’s been in and out of prison enough to know the score. Criminals are if nothing else pragmatic.
But here’s the soap: Pamela J. Ray falls in love with the guy and he with her. Not only that but he claims he was visited by Jesus twice in his prison cell and converted to Christianity, born again-like as is Pamela Ray who’s also an admirer of Rush Limbaugh. Yeah, like that. Still, the drama is captivating because it sheds a whole new light on the scenario. Files admitted his part as early as 1994 in a videotaped interview with a guy who soon turned up dead so that adds to the mystique of why confess after 31 years? There’s no statute of limitations on Murder One but since Oswald was already convicted de facto by the Warren Report there’s a very gray area surrounding any further legal action.
O yes, the Vatican and satellites are also considered to be in on the conspiracy, Italians all you know, sometimes hard to tell the ecclesiastics from the enforcers. See, John Kennedy and bro Rob were coming down on the organized crime syndicates whereas hitherto they’d catered to them for sake of procuring prostitutes, mistresses and concubines of some quality, even Marilyn Monroe. The Vietnam War which the Kennedys were planning on winding down much to the chagrin of the armament industry and the Asian opium trade, the vow to disperse the CIA to oblivion, Monroe’s pregnancy that she vowed not to disrupt, the general animosity building up with Lyndon Johnson’s potential indictment for illegal activities, all conspired toward, well, conspiracy. Everything was looking like John Kennedy was soon to be exposed for his flagrant dalliances so those also about to be exposed devised a one fell swoop plan to cover it all up. And it worked. And yes, most certainly the Kennedys off’d Marilyn because she was adamant about birthing John’s baby. Would a president actually do that? Um, now a word from our soap sponsor.
I know, I know, this stuff’s too pulpy fiction to be real. Well, we’re free to fall for the Warren Report too. BTW, Gerald Ford was on the Commission as was Allen Dulles. Ford pardoned Nixon and we know about the brothers Allen and John Foster. The more you look the more the names begin to click. Here’s another tidbit: James Files claims that Jimmy Hoffa was not murdered by the mob but by the CIA or FBI, incinerated in one of the immense trash burners located around Detroit, a logical assumption since I used to do so myself when briefly driving a truck in the city, pretty scary sight those drop-off docks that you definitely don’t want to fall into as you’re backed up to the abyss of soon-to-be high intensity pyromania conflagration. How hard would it be to shove a body off the back of a truck into a pit of trash awaiting very hot flames? There were no regulations or inspectors, anybody could do it. I always figured that would have been the CIA method. Those guys don’t even leave any bones, unlike the Skull & Bones society of Yale which worships evils that Charles Manson wouldn’t touch with his harem. I kid you not. Those guys play rough and conscienceless. It’s even rumored that JFK’s body was buried at sea per Kennedy family insistence and not at Arlington and that the Yale fraternity possesses his brain for their ritualistic inductee necromancy.
But Jim Files is reformed, or so he says. Pamela’s a piece of work, genuine and soap opera combo there. You’re not sure whether Barry Manilow or Victor Borgia would be best for background cacophony, I mean accompaniment. It’s a syndrome, this women falling in love with prisoners enigma. Both seem to want and need it so there’s no real harm I suppose although the monetary bite might be a factor to scrutinize. Emotions, well, that falls into the realm of no accounting for taste. Presumably one could say that James Files was emulating the CIA and all the rest of the government creeps in his chosen lifestyle and Pamela’s just a gun moll prisoner-hugger or what have you. The CIA’s the biggest drug dealer/murderer coalition on the face of planet Earth so goes the innuendo. The military industrial symbiosis thrives on war for its armament manufacture, troops, mercenaries, contractual services, all at exorbitant price gouging. The triumvirate goes on as usual as does bureaucracy all collecting pay, perks and pensions just like the lower rungs of cops, courts and corrections.
In any case, the Warren Report is now pretty much discredited so that piece of history will need to be erased from the grade school textbooks and something nebulous inserted, maybe something such as “it remains unknown, blah, blah, blah…” yeah, that’ll do. They say the Mounties always get their man but on the other hand many the law official will stress it’s often the citizens who offer the best clues to perpetrators. Who could’ve guessed that the perpetrator himself would come forward to solve a 50-year-old mystery? And guess what. Neither the Chicago mob nor any other litigates have any problem with Fines telling it like it is as long as he doesn’t implicate them, which he doesn’t directly but only with insinuation. It’s the government that wants retribution and informative cooperation any way they can get it. Nobody really cares about justice, just protecting their own, uh, private parts. There’s a volatile excerpt about that and Jim Files too, a torture sequence of some gruesome propensities that I’d rather not mention, this likely by the FBI since they didn’t kill him, a kindlier breed of torturer as contrasted with the CIA or the crime syndicate. Think forced colonoscopy with electrical shock value, dumped naked and bound unconscious on a Chicago street. I can say no more. Is this America? O-o-o yeah.
As with another book in review, PORTRAIT OF A KILLER, Jack the Ripper Case Closed by Patricia Cornwell, mysteries may be solved. One day the world will in fact know the full story of the World Trade Center terrorist attack. Where there exist conspiracy theories there exist conspiracies. Where there exist conspiracies there exist cover-ups. The blatancy of the Warren Commission opacity becomes more outrageous as time passes, one single bullet coming from four directions hitting multiple persons. With technological discovery, intrepid archaeological exploration, scientific analysis, and apparatus of microscopic and macroscopic penetration the world becomes more accessible to insight and empiric certainty. It is even suggested that psychic revelation is not far removed from scientific with each new discovery.
The mystery of John F. Kennedy in any case seems now resolved. It is probably too late to indict any of the major players but not too late to let the truth be known. If it should lead to shutting down the US government’s secret services so much the better, as Harry Truman once observed of his own creation, the Central Intelligence Agency, a cesspool of iniquity and insidiousness that got way out of control needing to be reined in and/or dispersed.
These renegade agencies run rampant with impunity and are now mirrored in the local police forces and bureaucratic redoubts that oppress for tax and arrogant control purport. We cannot expect a just society to come from an unjust administration. The chicken and the egg conundrum does not apply any longer, the system being too engrained to be concerned with catalysts. Where there exists organized crime assassination there is replicate government assassination both homeland and foreign. If America accepts Orwellian principles as heinous as those we profess to declaim, this country is no better. John F. Kennedy despite his foibles stood at variance to the major secret controlling factions in this country. That’s what condemned him. His readiness to condemn Marilyn Monroe nonetheless places him in the same category. That SKULL & BONES satanic Yale fraternity is integral to the hub of the control unit that undermines this country and infects the world with its imperialist arrogation. Evidently membership is lifelong, “The Patriarchs” said to be the graduate division.
Now that the media is largely corporate conglomeration, the internet and small presses are the sole remaining resources of information dissemination and interactive communication. This is why much innuendo wafts about as to controls on cyberspace. This can’t be shut down entirely because bureaucracy, surveillance, banking and commerce now rely upon it. Some maintain that NINETEEN-EIGHTY-FOUR is yet to come. If negotiable it would appear that the stage is well prepared. As we sift through the ashes of John F. Kennedy’s death, the story reveals many intrigues. One otherwise insignificant hit man may be the key that unlocks all hidden passage corridor doors.
There’s a follow up book by title of DARKEST COVERT OPERATIONS by the same author and interviewee. These books are in theory plausibly “culture bearers” in the long range effect promulgated, game changers despite ostensible negligibility. If this mystery is indeed resolved we may know this by the amount of vehement denial, credibility disclaimers or dismissive silence pervading.
Lyndon Johnson was said to have once muttered, “Behind every success there is a crime”, perhaps the only way to get anything done. LBJ also imparted to his mistress at a party in Dallas the night before the assassination, “After tomorrow those S.O.B.s will never embarrass me again – that’s no threat – that’s a promise”. Not mentioned in this book is the oft updated nuance about Malcolm (Mac) Wallace, a Texas associate of LBJ who was once convicted of contract murder though served no time due to his contacts, his fingerprint being the only one lifted from the sixth floor location of Oswald’s supposed shooting vantage point. Whether planted on a cardboard box or left in person, Mac’s print seems to be validated but he died in a one-car accident long ago. Lyndon Johnson is of course deceased but not Billy Sol Estes, another shadowy if flamboyant LBJ associate with whom he was being investigated for financial irregularities, campaign financing, questionable kickbacks and the like, Estes having done ten years for business swindles. The fingerprint evidence, not within the scope of this book, seems to indicate a Johnson associate who is suspected of as many as six or seven murders purportedly silencing Johnson adversaries or inconvenient bad publicity, one death of which was Johnson’s own sister who had once been romantically involved with Mac Wallace. Purportedly also Johnson if publicly indicted was to have been dropped from the forthcoming election ballot. Many people had reason to want JFK dead, far more than one lone gunman with whatever grudge he might have harbored. One can access endless documentation about this series of events but no one true verified absolute rendition materializes. James Files’ Pamela Ray version is the latest and as said just because it’s not the greatest induces some justification of acceptance. Of course that could simply be a CIA ploy too, one never knows but it doesn’t seem their style. The Warren Commission Report, itself presumably flawed by misinformation, perhaps had intense coercion to expedite. Urgency is a ploy of the conman. We saw this in the run-up to the Iraq attack but now all becomes clear if not yet resolved. The JFK assassination might be. The rationale after fifty years would be, IBGYBG, I’ll Be Gone, You’ll Be Gone. Case Closed. 