Profile in Courage: Congressman Neil Gallagher

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Profile in Courage: Congressman Neil Gallagher
by Bonnie James
National EIR
September 27, 2013

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Neil Gallagher, who was a member of Congress from New Jersey (1959-73), tells the story of his efforts to expose and defeat the secret government during the 1950s and ’60s, in which he risked his political career—and his life—by speaking truth to power.

LaRouchePAC has produced a remarkable new 100-minute video interview under the above title, which digs up long-buried and forgotten secrets, presented in the voice of one individual who was at the center of the dramatic events of the 1950s, ’60s, and early ’70s; this was the period of the McCarthy witchhunts; the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King; the upsurge of the rock-drug-sex counterculture, and much more. That individual, Cornelius (Neil) Gallagher, now a feisty 92-year-old, served as the Democratic Congressman from Bayonne, N.J., from 1959 to 1973—when he was driven out by the spider at the center of the secret government’s web: J. Edgar Hoover. [1]

Given the vast expansion of the secret government today—NSA spying on Americans; the corruption of our political process and institutions of government (especially the Congress) by the Wall Street financial imperium— it is urgent that the story presented here be given the widest circulation.

The Kennedy Assassination

Gallagher’s friendship with Jack Kennedy dated from the 1956 Democratic Convention, when Kennedy was a young Senator from Massachusetts and Gallagher was a Freeholder from Bayonne. In 1958, Gallagher was elected to Congress, and by then, Kennedy was contemplating a run for the Presidency. Kennedy’s election in 1960, and Gallagher’s position on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, put the two men in frequent contact, and they collaborated on the creation of the Peace Corps, among many other things.

Asked in the interview, who he thought was behind the assassination of JFK, he said: “I was convinced that, if there was a conspiracy, there was only one group that could have brought it off, and that was [FBI Director J. Edgar] Hoover. And Hoover hated the Kennedys. . . . I never could figure out whether or not he really set up Oswald. . . . And this guy, Lee Harvey Oswald had been to Russia. . . . So here you had a guy came back from Russia, was known to the FBI, went to the FBI! The FBI investigated him, and he was unloosed, and nobody knew what the hell was going on. And yet, there’s no way that the FBI could not have been monitoring Lee Harvey Oswald, all the time. Because they monitored everybody!”

The Warren Commission

A key figure of the period, and friend of Gallagher, was Hale Boggs of Louisiana, who was the House Majority Leader (1971-73) and member of the Warren Commission. In September 1966, Boggs came to Gallagher’s office and told him that Hoover had lied to the Commission, that the lone gunman story was a fraud, and that the investigation should be reopened. Boggs added that, “Hoover and the CIA have bugs planted in the House Caucus Rooms and most of our offices.”

“Suddenly everybody is scared of the FBI, is scared of Hoover, is scared of his spooks,” Gallagher said.

By this time, Gallagher reported, Boggs had begun to believe that Oswald had been set up. “And if you looked at the committee, the Warren Commission, it was the Chief Justice; and then it was John J. McCloy, the chairman of the board; Allen Dulles,” Gallagher said. “McCloy is the guy who did all the work and he wrote the opinion, along with the support of Dulles. And I asked President Johnson, one time, ‘How did you come to put Allen Dulles on there, who was an enemy of Kennedy’s?’ And he just avoided the whole question.”

“If Hoover didn’t set this whole thing up,” he added, “then there was only one other guy who could have done it, and that was Allen Dulles! Because Allen Dulles’s job, in Europe during World War II, was to run assassination committees, groups, all around Europe, when he was head of the OSS over there.” And, he noted, “He was an enemy of Kennedy.”

McCarthyism

Gallagher’s courage asserted itself as well, in his refusal to have anything to do with Sen. Joe McCarthy and his witchhunts of Americans based on charges of “Communist sympathies.” Even as “a little county commissioner” in the 1950s, Gallagher refused to sponsor McCarthy at a communion breakfast in his church. “I hated everything McCarthy stood for, and I guess it was contrary to what you were supposed to be if you were an Irish Catholic from Bayonne. But I had an innate feeling against injustice, and [McCarthy] was one of the worst provocateurs of injustice in America in those days.” Later, Gallagher, then in Congress, was approached by McCarthy’s sidekick, Roy Cohn, who, by that time, was one of Hoover’s political hit men, with a huge FBI dossier on then-Presidential candidate Bobby Kennedy. When Gallagher refused to hold hearings on the FBI’s charges against RFK, mafioso Sid Zagri, who accompanied Cohn, offered a him $100,000 bribe—and Cohn added a threat, that Hoover would not consider Gallagher a “friend,” if he refused. “I’m everybody’s friend, Roy,” the Congressman replied, “but I’m nobody’s whore.” Soon after that, Cohn returned with another demand from Hoover, which Gallagher rejected. Cohn threatened, “This is the last chance you are going to get!”

The capability to coordinate the cover-up achieved by the Warren Commission was demonstrated early in Johnson's career. As reported by Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Caro, Johnson "stole his first election in 1930" for a seat on the college senior council and won another school election by blackmail. [199] Through many such underhanded political tricks, Johnson became "so deeply and widely mistrusted" by his classmates that they called him "Bull," for "Bullshit" -- the nickname recorded in his yearbook. [200] And Johnson's incessant lying earned him the reputation of being "the biggest liar on campus." [201]

Yet prior to 1981, not one biography of Johnson reported this information about his college years. [202] The reason, Caro explained, was that while still an undergraduate at the Texas State Teachers College at San Marcos, Johnson

arranged to have excised (literally cut out) from hundreds of copies of the college yearbook certain pages that gave clues to his years there (luckily for history, some copies escaped the scissors). Issues of the college newspaper that chronicle certain crucial episodes in his college career are missing from the college library. A ruthless use thereafter of political power in San Marcos made faculty members and classmates reluctant to discuss those aspects of his career. [203]

If the skills to coordinate an assassination cover-up were honed in Johnson's college days, the motivation to do so was indicated by two allegations of payoffs to him from organized crime. One was reported by Jack Halfen, a Dallas gangster who had graduated from criminal exploits with desperados "Pretty Boy" Floyd, Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow to coordinating gambling during the 1940s and 1950s in the Houston area. [204] Bookmaking alone netted more than $15 million a year in Houston; [205] 40 percent went to Carlos Marcello, 35 percent to Halfen and 25 Percent to police and politicians for bribes. [206] These arrangements were illuminated during Halfen's 1954 trial for income-tax evasion, which brought him a four-year prison sentence. [207] But prosecutor Charles Herring, a friend and former aid of Lyndon Johnson, never pressed the embarrassing issue of where Halfen's myriad payoff dollars stopped. [208]

Although Halfen never informed on his Mob associates, his loyalty to political collaborators wore thin as the months in jail rolled by. [209] And in conversations with U.S. Marshal J. Neal Matthews in 1956, Halfen provided incriminating information on several of them, including one of his closest political affiliates: Lyndon Johnson. [210] Halfen reported that his Mob-franchised gambling network had given $500,000 in cash and campaign contributions to Johnson over a ten-year period while Johnson was in the Senate. [211] In return, Senator Johnson repeatedly killed antirackets legislation, watered down the bills that could not be defeated and curbed Congressional investigations of the Mob. [212] For example, a U.S. Senate committee chaired by Estes Kefauver held hearings on organized crime in more than a dozen cities during the early 1950s. [213] But the committee never made it to Texas, reportedly as a result of Johnson's intervention. [214] Halfen had concrete substantiation of his association with Johnson, including a letter from Johnson to the Texas Board of Paroles on his behalf [215] and photographs showing Johnson, Halfen and other Texas politicians on a private hunting expedition. [216]

Mob payoffs to Johnson were also indicated in sworn testimony by Jack Sullivan, a former administrative assistant to Senator Daniel Brewster of Maryland. [217] During a 1964 cocktail party at Teamster headquarters that Sullivan attended, Brewster and Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa walked off to talk privately on the terrace overlooking Capitol Hill. [218] Afterward, Brewster told Sullivan that Hoffa had asked him to take $100,000 in cash for Johnson to presidential aide Cliff Carter. [219] The payoff was meant to enlist Johnson's support in blocking Hoffa's prosecution for jury tampering and pension fund fraud, [222] for which Hoffa was ultimately convicted. [221]

A few days after the party, Sullivan testified, Teamster lobbyist Sid Zagri came into Senator Brewster's office and gave Brewster a suitcase full of money. [222] Sullivan then accompanied Brewster to Cliff Carter's office and waited in the car as Brewster went into the office with the suitcase and left without it. [223]

Lending credence to Sullivan's testimony was Senator Brewster's indictment for corruption by a Baltimore grand jury in 1969 and subsequent conviction. And both allegations were consistent with further unsavory patterns in Johnson's political career. Johnson secured his first federal office, a U.S. Senate seat in 1948, by winning a Democratic primary election in Texas. [224] He won by 87 votes -- when 203 new votes suddenly turned up in alphabetical order late in the ballot tabulation. [225] The federal government launched an investigation for vote fraud, [226] and suspicions were finally confirmed in 1977 when a Texas election judge, Luis Salas, confessed that the election had been stolen at Johnson's suggestion. [227]

During his years in Washington, Johnson retained his crooked habits, as disclosed by author Robert Caro:

For years, men came into Lyndon Johnson's office and handed him enveloped stuffed with cash. They didn't stop coming even when the office in which he sat was the office of the Vice President of the United States. Fifty thousand dollars (in hundred-dollar bills in sealed envelopes) was what one lobbyist -- for one oil company -- testified that he brought to Johnson's office during his term as Vice President. [228] [Emphasis in original.]

It was perhaps through such envelopes and the blatant use of political power to further his private business interests [229] that Johnson accumulated a $20 million fortune during his political career. [230]

-- Contract on America: The Mafia Murder of President John F. Kennedy, by David E. Scheim

The Congressman’s next encounter with Cohn involved even cruder threats from Hoover: “You’ll be sorry! Because if you’re not their friend, you’re Mr. Hoover’s enemy.”


Sen. Joe McCarthy’s reign of terror against American citizens in the 1950s paved the way for J. Edgar Hoover’s gestapo that followed. The link between them was the political hit man Roy Cohn. The photo at left shows McCarthy (left) with Cohn.



The inset photo on the right is of FBI Director Hoover.

It was right after that, that “the whole goddamned thing started,” Gallagher said, meaning the FBI’s witchhunt against him. In August 1967, just weeks after Gallagher refused to blackmail Bobby Kennedy, Life magazine published an article tying Gallagher closely with the mob.

Washington, D.C. -- Rep. Cornelius Gallagher (D-N.J.) said Monday that a magazine article linking him with Joe Zicarelli, reputed mafia boss of the Bayonne (N.J.) waterfront, was a "monstrous lie."

The article, in Life magazine, tied Gallagher and Zicarelli to an "alliance of interests," alleging attempted "fixes" of the Bayonne police department, dabbling in Caribbean politics, and the promotion of a contraband "cancer cure." It alleged attempts at reducing government eavesdropping against organized crime through the congressman's chairmanship of a special congressional subcommittee investigating federal Invasion of privacy.

Published in an eight page article titled "The Congressman and the Hoodlum," the article also alleged that Harold (Kayo) Konigsberg, a convicted extortionist, removed the body of a gambler six years ago from the congressman's home in Bayonne.

"No Marks on Body"

The body was said to be that of Barney O'Brien, a small time extortionist. O'Brien disappeared in October of 1962.

The Life article said: "On a night in October, 1962, Konigsberg was summoned by Gallagher himself to the congressman's home ... Then Gallagher led Konigsberg to the basement. There was the body of Barney O'Brien.

"Kayo ... said there were no marks on the body and that he thought O'Brien may have died of natural causes. Kayo said Gallagher asked him to get rid of the body. He said he replied that he wouldn't touch it without approval from the mob.

"According to Kayo, Gallagher then made several telephone calls. Within a few minutes a call came back for Konigsberg. It was Zicarelli, said Kayo, who told him to do what he could for Gallagher. At that point, Kayo said, he carried the body of O'Brien from Gallagher's basement, dumped it into the trunk of his auto."

The justice department had no comment on the article. The FBI denied reports that it had turned over to Life purported transcripts of eavesdropped telephone conversations between Gallagher and Zicarelli.

An FBI spokesman said that any information it might have was strictly confidential.

In a six page rebuttal, the New Jersey congressman denied that he ever had any dealings with Zicarelli, which related to the ganglord's gambling network. His only connection to Zicarelli, alias Joe Bayonne, was a routine recommendation written in behalf of Zicarelli's son who wanted to enter a medical school, he said.

Gallagher said that Zicarelli was receiving no special favors. He added that he had written hundreds of such recommendations for constituents and that he would never "condemn a young man's future because of his father's past."

"I reiterate: The charge that I helped take the heat off Zicarelli's gambling operations by contacting the Bayonne police is a plain and simple lie," Gallagher said. "It is a lie that slanders both me and the Bayonne police department."

Asks Investigation

Life charged that on June 21, 1960, the ganglord telephone Gallagher and complained that the Bayonne police were cracking down on his gambling network. That was about a week after authorities began electronic surveillance of a public telephone booth often used by Zicarelli.

According to Life, shortly thereafter the congressman reassured Zicarelli that there would be "no further problem" from the Bayonne police. Gallagher mentioned to Zicarelli that he had talked to "the little guy in Jersey City," who in turn spoke with the police, the article said.

Gallagher dismissed the Life article as "malicious" and politically biased. The Life article asserted that federal officials grew alarmed by the alleged telephone conversations between Gallagher and Zicarelli.

Gallagher has asked Joseph A. Tumulty, Hudson county (New Jersey) prosecutor, for a grand jury investigation of the Life article.

"I cannot now discuss in detail the reasons why Life has decided to smear my name, and has attempted to destroy my career, for these facts are spelled out in my letter to prosecutor Tumulty. Since the factual evidence of LIfe's malicious intentions now in my possession would be used in any forthcoming legal action, it would be indiscreet and improper for me to present that evidence at this time."

-- Life Magazine Links Jersey Congressman to Mafia, by The Milwaukee Journal, August 6, 1968

The Takeover of the Congress

Hoover’s capo in the Congress was Deke DeLoach: “He would bring over tapes that they had on various Congressmen and say, ‘We’re your friends and we’re in your corner,’ but that meant that they owned them. It was tantamount to blackmail. He really was the number 3 guy in the FBI.”

“If you were on the Appropriations Committee, which funded the FBI, or the Justice Department, you were in it! If you were on the Judiciary Committee, or in the top leadership, you came under their umbrella and under their threats. . . . The top three or four people on that Judiciary Committee, they were owned by Hoover.”

Ultimately, Hoover & Co. went too far, demanding that Gallagher resign from Congress. Cohn threatened: “If you don’t resign, Mr. Hoover wants you out of Congress in seven days.” If not, Gallagher’s wife would be dragged through the mud, in another smear story in Life magazine. How he got them to back off is a story we should let Mr. Gallagher tell in his own words!

Boggs Calls for Hoover’s Resignation

In April 1971, Rep. Hale Boggs met with Gallagher, telling him the repairman had found his phone bugged. The next morning, Boggs called for Hoover’s resignation on the floor of the Congress.

“The time has come for the Attorney General to ask for [Hoover’s] resignation. When the FBI taps the telephones of members of this body and the Senate, it stations agents on campuses, when the FBI adopts the tactics of the Soviet Union and Hitler’s Gestapo, it is time, it is way past time, Mr. Speaker, that the present director no longer be the director. I ask again now that you have enough courage to demand the resignation of this man.”

At the same time, Boggs pushed to reopen the investigations of the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King.

The Louisiana Congressman was close to New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison—the only law enforcement official in the United States who ever brought charges against anyone connected with the Kennedy assassination. [2] Garrison, like everyone else connected with the efforts to get to the truth about that terrible event, paid dearly: He was hounded and slandered, and driven out of office. But Boggs was convinced that the destruction of Jim Garrison was based on the fact that Garrison was right, that there was a conspiracy.

On April 10, 1972, a Federal Grand Jury indicted Gallagher on charges of conspiracy, perjury, and Federal income tax evasion.

Gallagher went to the floor of the Congress, and for the first time, put forward the details of the filth thrown against him under orders from Hoover, the origin of the Life magazine articles, the broad intimidation of Congress, and the incredible revelations that had been presented to his subcommittee regarding U.S. Army, FBI, and CIA abuses of the Constitutional rights of Americans.

He called for Hoover’s resignation, or firing.

Six months later, on Oct. 18, 1972, a plane carrying Hale Boggs disappeared in Alaska.

Hoover died on May 2, 1972, just two weeks after Gallagher had gone before the House, calling for his resignation.


House Majority Leader Hale Boggs of Louisiana called for Hoover’s resignation on the floor of the Congress, in April 1971. On Oct. 18, 1972, Boggs was killed in a plane crash. He is shown here with President Lyndon Johnson in the mid-1960s.

Boggs’ courage inspired Reps. Allard Lowenstein and Frank Church to reopen the investigation of the Kennedy murder, leading to the 1975 Church Committee on Assassinations and 1976-1978 House Select Committee on Assassinations.

Congressman Lowenstein, Boggs’ close collaborator, was shot and killed in 1980.

In his closing remarks of this interview, Neil Gallagher said: “I worry very much about what the hell’s going to happen to this country, unless people become aware of it. The frailty of civilization, and the ability to destroy it, is so widespread now. As long as people in the Congress don’t raise these questions about the role of the secret government in America, or the secret governments in America; or the real role of the secret societies, in America—as long as there’s no protection for them, they can be destroyed overnight.”

What we see today in the immorality and dysfunction of our institutions of government can be viewed through the prism of those terrible events described by Neil Gallagher.


“I worry very much about what the hell’s going to happen to this country, unless people become aware of [the secret government],” Gallagher said. He is shown here with President Kennedy, in the 1960s.

_______________

Notes:

1. Ron Felber’s book, The Privacy War: One Congressman, J. Edgar Hoover and the Fight for the Fourth Amendment (2003), covers Gallagher’s battle to protect Americans’ from the intrusions of the secret government.

2. See Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, One Man’s Quest To Solve the Murder of President Kennedy, 1988.

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Life Magazine Links Jersey Congressman to Mafia
by The Milwaukee Journal
August 6, 1968

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Washington, D.C. -- Rep. Cornelius Gallagher (D-N.J.) said Monday that a magazine article linking him with Joe Zicarelli, reputed mafia boss of the Bayonne (N.J.) waterfront, was a "monstrous lie."

The article, in Life magazine, tied Gallagher and Zicarelli to an "alliance of interests," alleging attempted "fixes" of the Bayonne police department, dabbling in Caribbean politics, and the promotion of a contraband "cancer cure." It alleged attempts at reducing government eavesdropping against organized crime through the congressman's chairmanship of a special congressional subcommittee investigating federal Invasion of privacy.

Published in an eight page article titled "The Congressman and the Hoodlum," the article also alleged that Harold (Kayo) Konigsberg, a convicted extortionist, removed the body of a gambler six years ago from the congressman's home in Bayonne.

"No Marks on Body"

The body was said to be that of Barney O'Brien, a small time extortionist. O'Brien disappeared in October of 1962.

The Life article said: "On a night in October, 1962, Konigsberg was summoned by Gallagher himself to the congressman's home ... Then Gallagher led Konigsberg to the basement. There was the body of Barney O'Brien.

"Kayo ... said there were no marks on the body and that he thought O'Brien may have died of natural causes. Kayo said Gallagher asked him to get rid of the body. He said he replied that he wouldn't touch it without approval from the mob.

"According to Kayo, Gallagher then made several telephone calls. Within a few minutes a call came back for Konigsberg. It was Zicarelli, said Kayo, who told him to do what he could for Gallagher. At that point, Kayo said, he carried the body of O'Brien from Gallagher's basement, dumped it into the trunk of his auto."

The justice department had no comment on the article. The FBI denied reports that it had turned over to Life purported transcripts of eavesdropped telephone conversations between Gallagher and Zicarelli.

An FBI spokesman said that any information it might have was strictly confidential.

In a six page rebuttal, the New Jersey congressman denied that he ever had any dealings with Zicarelli, which related to the ganglord's gambling network. His only connection to Zicarelli, alias Joe Bayonne, was a routine recommendation written in behalf of Zicarelli's son who wanted to enter a medical school, he said.

Gallagher said that Zicarelli was receiving no special favors. He added that he had written hundreds of such recommendations for constituents and that he would never "condemn a young man's future because of his father's past."

"I reiterate: The charge that I helped take the heat off Zicarelli's gambling operations by contacting the Bayonne police is a plain and simple lie," Gallagher said. "It is a lie that slanders both me and the Bayonne police department."

Asks Investigation

Life charged that on June 21, 1960, the ganglord telephone Gallagher and complained that the Bayonne police were cracking down on his gambling network. That was about a week after authorities began electronic surveillance of a public telephone booth often used by Zicarelli.

According to Life, shortly thereafter the congressman reassured Zicarelli that there would be "no further problem" from the Bayonne police. Gallagher mentioned to Zicarelli that he had talked to "the little guy in Jersey City," who in turn spoke with the police, the article said.

Gallagher dismissed the Life article as "malicious" and politically biased. The Life article asserted that federal officials grew alarmed by the alleged telephone conversations between Gallagher and Zicarelli.

Gallagher has asked Joseph A. Tumulty, Hudson county (New Jersey) prosecutor, for a grand jury investigation of the Life article.

"I cannot now discuss in detail the reasons why Life has decided to smear my name, and has attempted to destroy my career, for these facts are spelled out in my letter to prosecutor Tumulty. Since the factual evidence of LIfe's malicious intentions now in my possession would be used in any forthcoming legal action, it would be indiscreet and improper for me to present that evidence at this time."

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The Congressman and the Hoodlum
by Russell Sackett, Sandy Smith and William Lambert
Life Magazine
August 9, 1968

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Gangster Joe Zicarelli, a New Jersey capo in Cosa Nostra. Ties bind the congressman and the hoodlum in an alliance of interests.

This is the story of the corruption of a U.S. congressman by the Mob. Not just any congressman, but one of influence and importance both within the U.S. government and, to an extent, abroad-the Honorable Cornelius E. ("Neil") Gallagher, Democrat from New Jersey's 13th Congressional District, a key member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and the House Government Operations Committee, the chairman of the U.S. and Canadian Interparliamentary Group, and a former U.S. delegate to the Disarmament Conference. Gallagher, a man as prominent in the party as he is in government, was among the handful seriously considered by Lyndon B. Johnson as a possible running mate. He would have made an attractive candidate. He has good looks, charm, intelligence – he once taught at Rutgers. His war record is impressive – as a captain he commanded a rifle company in Europe in World War II and Korea and was wounded three times, winning eight decorations.

As previously revealed in LIFE'S continuing series on the Mob and its enterprises, organized crime has succeeded in planting its poisonous roots deep in American business, inside labor unions and city and state government. Now, an eight-month investigation by a team of LIFE reporters has established that the Mob has gained yet another choice plum. Behind the facade of prestige and respectability lives another Neil Gallagher – a man who time and again has served as the tool and collaborator of a Cosa Nostra gang lord.

Congressman Neil Gallagher's tiein with this glowering Cosa Nostra figure, Joe Zicarelli, has ranged from his own home turf in Bayonne, N.J. to points as far distant as Montreal and Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic. it has involved such diverse interests as "fixes" with local New Jersey police, Caribbean politics, the promotion of a contraband "cancer cure" and a gangster's weird tale about the disposal of a corpse.

The story of Gallagher's availability to run the Mob's errands begins with conversations he had in the summer of 1960 with Zicarelli. The latter had a complaint. The police had strayed out of line and were putting heat on some of his men in the gambling rackets. Zicarelli wanted this nonsense stopped.

In Cosa Nostra, Zicarelli holds the rank of capo, or captain, in the fearsome Joe Bonanno "Family." In the rackets he is known by the nickname Joe Bayonne, derived from the New Jersey industrial waterfront city, which squats opposite Manhattan's towering financial district. This is Zicarelli's - and Gallagher's - power base. To Zicarelli a political "connection" - or "The Fix" - is a thing of beauty, like cash in a Swiss bank, or two star sapphire pinky rings. Racketeering in all its profitable and ugly aspects is Zicarelli's trade, and his connections have kept him operating.

Above all, Zicarelli is cagey. For a long time, he followed the practice of issuing his orders to captive New Jersey politicians from public telephones.

On the morning of Monday, June 13, 1960, authorities began electronic surveillance of a Manhattan bar telephone booth from which Zicarelli conducted his business. They were interested solely in the mobster. The congressman came into the inquiry unexpectedly; and what to do about this has been troubling officials of the Department of justice ever since.


In 1960 Joe Zicarelli maintained a Manhattan "pad" in the Park Royal Hotel. Electronic surveillance of his suite by law officers yielded evidence linking the mobster boss to Congressman Gallagher.

On June 13, from the pay telephone, Zicarelli called Gallagher's unlisted telephone at the congressman's law office in Bayonne. There was no answer. Zicarelli called the congressman's home. Gallagher wasn't there, either.

A week passed. The following Monday, June 20, Zicarelli called Gallagher's law office once again and placed two more calls to the congressman's home. Again Gallagher was out and this time Zicarelli asked the woman who answered to tell the congressman to "call Mr. Gray at the Murray Hill number."

On the next day, June 21, Zicarelli finally got through to Gallagher on the unlisted office telephone. He complained that the Bayonne police had staked out the key stations of his gambling network. His business was being disrupted, Zicarelli huffed, by the treachery of a top police official.

"O.K.," said Gallagher. "Let me get hold of him right now."

A few hours later, Zicarelli phoned Gallagher again at his office, demanding to know what the congressman had done for him.

"I got hold of a friend who said [the police official] was jumping," said Gallagher. "I got a hold of the little guy in Jersey City and told him to reach out for him [the police official]."

That night, a messenger from Bayonne appeared at the West Side apartment used by Zicarelli as a Manhattan hideaway. With the authorities listening in, he gave the gangster some bad news.

"One of the lightweights [an honest policeman] grabbed a guy [a Zicarelli runner] with a bag of money - return money," the messenger said. "Later, I laid it in to -- -------- [naming a Bayonne policeman]. I said you guys are wrong here, taking out money and then hurting people."

Zicarelli cautioned the messenger to keep his cool. "I talked to the top man," counseled Zicarelli. "Take it easy. Don't get excited. He'll see [the police official] tomorrow."

'Mr. Gray got him off the House floor

Zicarelli was unwilling to wait. On June 23 he telephoned Gallagher's home and tersely left word for the congressman to "call Mr. Gray."

It was two days later, Saturday, June 25, before Gallagher returned the call to Zicarelli at the pay phone. This colloquy followed: Gallagher: I got hold of those people [Bayonne police] and there will be no further problem. Zicarelli: I hope so, because they're ruining me. Gallagher: They damn well better not.

Zicarelli: They're doing a job on me like was never done before. Gallagher: I laced into them.

Gallagher said he would "follow through" on the job. He explained that he was going to Washington, and said that if Zicarelli would call him there he would call back.

A few days later Zicarelli, using the name of "Mr. Gray," did telephone Gallagher's office in Washington. One of the congressman's aides told him that Congress was in session and Gallagher was on the floor of the House of Representatives.

"Well, get him off the floor – this is important," commanded Zicarelli.

The aide, shaken by the imperious manner of "Mr. Gray," suggested that Mr. Gray call the Capitol direct. Zicarelli did, and Gallagher quickly left the House floor at the word that Mr. Gray was calling. The "important" message was simply that Joe Zicarelli wanted to see his congressman as soon as possible.

That telephone conversation was followed by a number of Sunday morning meetings between Gallagher and Zicarelli. Some of these brunch powwows (LIFE, Sept. 1, 1967) were uncovered by authorities who had Zicarelli under surveillance.


In 1964, while he was serving as the cochairman of the Canadian-American Interparliamentary Group, Democrat Gallagher was received warmly by President Johnson at the White House.

Small wonder, then, that Justice Department officials, who knew about Gallagher's connections with the Cosa Nostra capo, were apprehensive about testifying before a House subcommittee a year ago last spring.

Under the chairmanship of Dante B. Fascell, the hearings were delving into the federal effort against organized crime-and right there big as life sat subcommittee member Gallagher. It was, as one Justice employe was later to observe, a little like having your cotton crop investigated by a boll weevil. Gallagher had meanwhile become-with Missouri's Senator Ed Long (LIFE, May 26 and Nov. 10, 1967 and July 26, 1968)- a leading congressional spokesman against government invasions of privacy, including the very investigative technique that had first disclosed his own alliance with the mob.

As the hearing proceeded, Congressman Gallagher reflected self-assurance in his questioning of a succession of federal enforcement officials. The thrust of his remarks was that organized crime - specifically the Mafia - was a vastly overblown concept, and that the federal effort against it was too big a weapon for the size of the target, and that innocent people could be wrongly damaged through unwitting association with mobsters.

"Sometimes I have the feeling," he said, "as we go down the path into all sorts of uncharted areas, especially in the area of computers and the invasion of privacy, that if there had been no Mafia, perhaps Big Government would have had to invent one."

In due course he came around to what might have been most on his mind. "When you get into the exotic fields that the organized crime unit has got into . . . it is quite conceivable that anybody who ever was in the same theater with an organized crime identified type is going to find that moment in his life frozen into a government computer, and forever more he remains part of the organized crime complex."

Early last month three LIFE reporters paid a visit to the congressman's offices in Washington after he had agreed to discuss the information gathered by this magazine. With Attorney Lawrence I. Weisman at his side, Gallagher was asked if he had "any association" with Zicarelli.

"No," said the congressman. After that flat assertion, the following was said:

Q: /You/ never called him or talked to him?

A: Let me tell you something. Can I talk off the record? I want to level with you. I want to level with you.

Q: / don't think we ought to get off the record on a thing like this. A: Okay, then, we won't. Mr. Zicarelli on several occasions has called me-ah, one way or another -about his son who was a doctor trying to get into med school and he thought he was being discriminated against. . . . One day he called me straight here. Q: Did you say he called you here?

A: A long time ago. I think twice. I think when the kid was trying to get into medical school.

Q: At your office?

A: Yes. And I think one time in the hustle and bustle and nobody was here and the phone call came through over in the other place Ithe Housel. It was over on the floor . . . he called there cold and said: "I hope you don't mind." I tried to brush him off as best I could, saying it was a long day or something. He said, "Well, I'm a taxpayer. . . ." Well, you know, kiddingly, or whatever the hell. Q: Did you ever get any calls from a Mr. Gray? A: Mr. Gray. . . . I think that is who he (Zicarellil said he was. I don't know. He didn't say who was . . . I think that's probably how the hell he got on the line. Q: Why would he get on the line any faster if he said he was Mr. Gray than if he said he was Mr. Zicarelli?

Joe Zicarelli needed help to buy an airline

A: Well, I wouldn't get on the line if I knew it was Mr. Zicarelli. You know, you've got to try to be circumspect about these goddam things and not hurt a person's feelings or get anybody angry at you.

Q: But you did know who he was?

A: What?

Q: You knew who Joe Zicarelli was?

A: Not the first time. Not the first time. . . . I guess he just figured I got it through one time before. But I would try to duck it as much as I could.

At another point in the interview, Gallagher was asked, "Did you ever telephone Zicarelli?"

"Never," he replied.

Q: Absolutely never?

A: Never.

Q: It's not possible that you're making a mistake?

A: That I called Joe Zicarelli? No.

Gallagher also denied that he had met with Zicarelli at any time, in a restaurant or any other place. At this point, Attorney Weisman interjected:

"The congressman said that they [the meetings] did not take place. I haven't talked with the congressman about this but I'll put something on the table and test your sense of fairness. He's willing to take . . . I would advise him to take a lie detector test to determine whether these are the facts. . . .

Gallagher quickly cut in:

"Hey, let me say something. I don't believe in lie detector tests. They're snake oil. That's one of the reasons I'm where I am, because of the investigations that I've had with all this stuff and I became a target because . . . I believe there should be some integrity in what the hell we do and not believe in the whole question of the drift toward a police state and McCarthyism with its new name, Mafiaism. And . . . probably that's why I'm being slammed a little bit right now." Q: The information we have is that you did, in fact, intercede for Zicarelli with the Bayonne police department to slow up investigations that the Bayonne police were making into his lotteries and other gambling that he has over there. Now, I'd like a response to that. A: I categorically deny that that ever happened. I never had any influence with the police in Bayonne.

Q: Did you ever speak to any public official in Bayonne in connection with Joe Zicarelli's operations?

A: I have-uh-Joe Zicarelli is like a legend in Bayonne. All the exfighters and all the people who he probably handed out money to, to help, or something I don't know . . .

Q: Did you ever speak to a public official in Bayonne in connection with Joe Zicarelli's interests?

A: No, I never did.

Later the interview got into the fact that Gallagher currently is one of three partners in a home construction firm in Bayonne, known by a number of names including Edmart, Inc. The other two partners are Dr. Martin Turkish, a Bayonne physician, and Edward Slifka. At the time of Zicarelli's overheard phone calls, as it turns out, Slifka was the deputy police commissioner of Bayonne.
The congressman seemed especially ill at ease when questioned about Edmart.

Q: Were you equal partners in this thing, Congressman?

A: A . . . yes. I hesitate on it because on . . . of the things that I did not like to appear as a partner on the building was, if you're in politics you obviously . . . what I'm undergoing now is . . . takes place many times. But the other problem in politics is that if you appear as a principal in building there are all kinds of people in . . . local political people who set up straw men [so] that you would have to call them and say: "Would you please remove that straw man?" It might be just the issuance of a permit, or a water pipe, or to turn the heat on, whatever the little thing may be. They set up a pattern of harassing you to the point where . . . and as soon as you call them for that they say: "Oh, by the way, I've got a brother-in-law. Can you get him a job?" Or whatever. It's give and take like that. So for those reasons I never really appeared as an equal partner, but in fact I am an equal partner. I appear as the attorney.

Q: Has it been lucrative?

A: Well, I can't say that I'm getting rich on it. But it's $25,000 . . . $30,000 . . .

Q: Has it been producing that every year?

A: I can't say it produced it this year.

Slifka, the congressman's present partner, also had turned up in the electronic surveillance over Zicarelli.

On Sept. 15, 1960, when he was still deputy police commissioner, he called Zicarelli on the pay telephone the gangster was using at the time. Slifka wanted Zicarelli to know that Gallagher was off on a 10-day trip.

"I know, I spoke to him earlier," said Zicarelli. "Where's he going?"

Europe and Africa, Slifka answered proudly. "He's no longer a kid," he said. "He's representing the U.S. all by himself. He's the next governor. He was at the armory this morning and they gave him an ovation as big as Kennedy's [President John F. Kennedy]." Slifka and Zicarelli agreed that Neil Gallagher certainly was a fine fellow.


Here is Bayonne, N.J., an industrial township where young Neil Gallagher grew up across the river from Manhattan and which is his - and Zicarelli's - power base. Arrow indicates Broadway National Bank, of which Gallagher is a director. His law offices adjoin the bank.

Secret traffic in an illegal 'cancer drug'

Among Gallagher's considerable attributes, so far as Zicarelli was concerned, was his seat on the prestigious House Foreign Affairs Committee. For all his small-town nickname, Joe Bayonne had important foreign affairs of his own – among others, with the Dominican Republic, to which he sold arms during the terrorist regime of Rafael Trujillo.

In the scramble that followed Trujillo's assassination, however, Zicarelli was reaching for a new grip. When Joaquin Balaguer – once Trujillo's puppet president – was elected head of state in 1966, Zicarelli saw his chance to get control of the republic's faltering airline, Compahia Dominicana de Aviation. Even as a legitimate business its prospects were good, once the tourists started returning. But as a licensed international carrier which Cosa Nostra could put to use in all the shady trades in which it specializes, it could be a flying bullion lode.

The gangster's attorney, Stephen Hoffman, who had served as registered agent for Balaguer during the latter's exile in the U.S., was on hand for Balaguer's inauguration on July 1, 1966. Gallagher also was there, in the official delegation from Washington. Early the following year, on a visit that some federal authorities are convinced was directly connected with Zicarelli's bid for the airline, Hoffman flew down again. So did Congressman Gallagher - on the same plane, in fact. They met and talked.

President Balaguer later confided to a friend that Gallagher, during his visit, had professed himself interested in sugar investments "and any other kind of business deal he can put together." Indeed, the congressman told embassy officials on arriving that the nature of his trip was "personal." Yet Gallagher told LIFE that the trip had the official sanction of the Foreign Affairs Committee and various government departments fie had consulted. The committee, he said, had picked up the tab for the trip.

Even so, the U.S. embassy in Santo Domingo was embarrassed by the circumstances of Gallagher's visit and the fact that it coincided with that of Hoffman, whose Balaguer-Zicarelli affiliations were well known. Embassy officers cabled Washington that the congressman had assured them he was "trying to keep Hoffman at arm's length." (Later Gallagher told LIFE he had never discussed Hoffman's presence with anyone at the embassy.) Ambassador John H. Crimmins told the State Department he regretted Gallagher's involvement in the island republic, and said it appeared the congressman was "naive."

Despite the efforts of his envoys, Zicarelli never did pull off the airline deal. But the activity in Santo Domingo does follow a pattern that repeats itself where Zicarelli and the congressman are concerned: when and where the gangster needs influential help, along comes Congressman Gallagher. Another example: Laetrile.


Lawyer Steve Hoffman, who has represented gangster Joe Zicarelli in a variety of capacities, walks near his apartment in an uptown Manhattan neighborhood.

Laetrile, a purported cancer drug, is manufactured in Canada by a firm called Biozymes International Ltd. and promoted by the McNaughton Foundation. Both are headed by Andrew R.L. McNaughton, the swashbuckling son of the late General A.G.L. McNaughton, distinguished Canadian soldier and diplomat. The use of Laetrile, which is made chiefly from an extract of peach and apricot pits, is illegal both in Canada and in the U.S. If it could be government approved Biozymes International stock would become very valuable indeed. This was a situation bright with the prospects of profit for a man like Joe Zicarelli, with his Washington connections.

The McNaughton Foundation gives callers the names of four doctors said to be treating cancer patients with the drug. One of the doctors is located in Italy, two others in Mexican border towns.

The fourth doctor practices in Union City, N.J. the heart of Zicarelli country - at the clinic where Joe Zicarelli himself is being treated for "anxieties." (The doctor told a LIFE reporter Zicarelli is receiving "placebo therapy," i.e., sugar pills, for his nerves.)

In a remarkably candid interview with two LIFE reporters in Montreal on May 1, McNaughton admitted: "I am doing something highly illegal in your country.

"First of all," he said, "the diversion of Laetrile from Canada to the U.S. is an offense against the Canadian food and drug regulations. Secondly, it's an offense against the American food and drug regulations. Thirdly, it's an illegal act to take it across the border - and I suppose you could find 10 other crimes that are involved in it. We are doing this on a reasonably large scale Zicarelli, said McNaughton, has an interest in smuggling Laetrile into the U.S., where he said at least 150 patients are now being illegally treated with the drug. McNaughton said that Steve Hoffman, who had been his attorney and a stockholder in Biozymes International, had introduced him to Zicarelli. He also said he strongly suspects that the gangster, using another man's name as a front, had donated between $100,000 and $130,000 to the nonprofit McNaughton Foundation. And he guessed that Zicarelli might, under someone else's name, also be a stockholder in Biozymes.

It was Hoffman, according to McNaughton, who also introduced him to "the man who can do the job [for Laetrile] in Washington . . . introduce us around, get us favorable consideration from the Food and Drug Administration." Enter, once again, Congressman Gallagher.


A mobster has told police he lugged the corpse of a loan shark from Gallagher's ample old frame house in Bayonne. Gallagher's car, bearing the distinctive plate number CEG1, is seen in the driveway.

A chiller right out of a Hitchcock film

The most intriguing link of all between Zicarelli and Gallagher involves an incident so garish as to strain belief were it not for the evidence. It concerns a return favora big one-allegedly sanctioned by Zicarelli for the congressman. The story, told in detail here for the first time, could be right out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie.

Bernard ("Barney") O'Brien was a smalltime loan shark and exbookie whose legitimate business was a Dairy Treat ice cream stand on Highway 440 in Bayonne. Most nights he was home at 6 o'clock for dinner with his brother Mike and his sister Shirley in the flat they shared on the shore of Newark Bay. Barney never married. His escapades with women gave him what passes for playboy status in Bayonne. The folks in Bayonne, when they talk about him now, agree that Barney was a "character," and in this view Neil Gallagher concurs. In his interview with LIFE reporters on July 3 the congressman was asked, "When did you meet Bernard O'Brien?" There was a hesitation. "Bernard O'Brien? . . . Oh, Barney O'Brien," Gallagher replied. "Barney's been a local character in Bayonne for years and years. I knew Barney when . . . I was a kid."

Q: Did you know him well?

A: Not intimately. I knew him to say hello, to kid with. Once in a while I'd stop off and buy ice cream and things for my children. And what Barney did or didn't do I had no idea. Except I did know that he ran that Dairy Treat.

Whatever recognition Barney acquired during his life in or out of the rackets was confined to Bayonne. Here he harvested bets and did a bit of shylocking on a franchise from the big shot, Joe Zicarelli. Then Barney simply vanished from his grubby little world.

"I remember that night as if it were last night," says Shirley O'Brien, talking about the evening of Saturday, Oct. 13, 1962 when her brother Barney walked out of their apartment for the last time.

She said she had fixed their supper but Barney pushed it away untouched. He went back to the living room to slouch in the chair while Shirley did the dishes.

"A little after 8 o'clock he got up and said he was going out to watch the fights on TV. He walked out the door without saying another word. And I never saw him again."

Barney, said Shirley, was a "good, good man" with many friends.

"Barney was a good friend of Neil Gallagher," she adds.

After leaving his home that night, Barney stopped at the Colony Diner on Communipaw Avenue and then drove to the Dairy Treat to watch the boxing matches on TV. His partner, Michael Oshust, operated the shop on the night shift. Oshust died in 1964. After Barney disappeared, Oshust told police that O'Brien looked at the fights until 10:45 p.m., when there were three rounds left in one match. Oshust said O'Brien then announced, "I'm going to get the papers and go home." He never got there. Investigators have been unable to find anyone who saw him alive after he wheeled his auto out of the driveway of the Dairy Treat.

A little after midnight, Oshust closed the Dairy Treat and drove to his home in East Orange. He told authorities that he went to bed about 2 o'clock on Sunday morning, Oct. 14.


Drive-in manager and minor shylock Barney O'Brien smiled for the camera during a coffee break. Soon after, Barney was dead and his body had been disposed of by mob muscleman Kayo Konigsberg who said he removed it from Gallagher's house.

At about 3 a.m., Oshust said, he was awakened by the bedside phone. It had an unlisted number.

As he picked up the phone, Oshust said, a man's voice came over the wire, saying, "Remember this call. You'll hear from us in a couple of days."

"What did you say?" asked Oshust.

A click sounded in Oshust's ear as the caller hung up. Oshust turned over and went back to sleep.

Over the next five years, law enforcement agencies were unable to turn up any solid information about Barney's fate. The possibility of mob vengeance was discounted. Authorities determined that relations between Barney and Zicarelli had been amicable up to the time Barney disappeared. It was considered certain that Barney was too smart to cross Zicarelli.

The Case of Barney O'Brien remained dormant in missing persons files until February 1967, when FBI agents got the first hint of what had happened to him. The information came from, of all people, Harold ("Kayo") Konigsberg, a man who possessed terrifying credentials as a gangster.

"Gallagher was to take us to the Veterans Administration, Bethesda [Naval Hospital], Walter Reed, you name it," said McNaughton. "Hoffman said, 'Gallagher's the man.' I said, well, he'll expect some recompense, and Hoffman said, 'We'll work it out.' " Gallagher denied that anyone talked to him about recompense. The appointments were made, all right, but the presentations misfired and Laetrile remains an unauthorized and, for now, unprofitable drug.

Congressmen often do constituents favors and see that they get hearings in the halls of the capital. Gallagher claimed that is all he was doing for Laetrile - at the request of a constituent, Dr. John A. Morrone. Now deceased, Dr. Morrone was a Jersey City surgeon and a close friend of Joe Zicarelli.

As it turns out, helping Dr. Morrone was not Congressman Gallagher's only interest in the contraband drug. Until recently one of the directors of Biozymes was Gallagher's friend and law partner, E. A. ("Ed") Dembe. Of the total stock issue of Biozymes, the largest single block - some 1.2 million shares - is held in the name of the Broadway National Bank of Bayonne. Ed Dembe is one of the bank's owners. Congressman Gallagher is a director.

Dembe claims he did not know of Gallagher's connections with Laetrile at the time he became a director of the manufacturing firm and later when he agreed to let his hank become nominee for the Biozymes stock in a strange agreement with an old friend of his, Steve Schwartz. (Schwartz is a gunrunner and international operator who is tied to mobster Carmine Galente, a fellow capo of Zicarelli's in the Bonanno Family of Cosa Nostra. Schwartz was also in Santo Domingo at the same time Gallagher and Hoffman were there, but no one is quite sure why.) Dembe told two LIFE reporters he presumed the stock actually belonged to Schwartz, but "I never had a pinpoint, detailed, hold-'em-up-against-the-wall conversation with Steve" about it. Dembe said the stock certificates are not held in the Bayonne bank, but "someplace up in Canada."

Gallagher claims he knew nothing of his partner's or the bank's involvement with the stock until "after you fellows talked to Eddie."

When interviewed by LIFE, all parties - McNaughton, Hoffman, Dembe and Congressman Gallagher - made essentially the same request: don't write anything that's going to hurt the fight against cancer. Gallagher was asked if a congressman wasn't sticking his neck out a bit to go to bat for a cancer drug unknown to him, being promoted by men he claimed were virtual strangers. "Look," he said, "if Bonnie and Clyde had a cure for cancer, you should listen."


Konigsberg struggles in the grip of a detective.

Konigsberg's home base was Bayonne. For years police and federal agents considered the hulking Kayo the most dangerous uncaged killer on the east coast. A federal official has said, "Kayo was an animal on a leash for Zicarelli and others. All they had to do was unsnap the leash and he'd kill for the fun of it." Konigsberg shot some of his victims, throttled others with his bare hands. As a loan shark, he took over the deadbeat loans of other shylocks and joyfully went about squeezing cash from the borrowers, sometimes by beating them with ball bats and chairs. In due course Konigsberg was brought to trial for extortion and convicted, despite his plea of insanity - the court having heard testimony from a psychiatrist who declared Kayo sane.

In a place as small as Bayonne, it might be expected that the paths of Kayo and Gallagher might cross now and then. Gallagher affirmed that this had indeed happened.

"Another big name in Bayonne," said Gallagher. "Kayo is a . . . Kayo is an original. I don't know . . . I tell you everybody knew Kayo."

It was in 1964, while serving a prison term for possessing stolen goods, that Kayo began dropping hints that he was willing to talk to the government about Cosa Nostra. The Mob now began to view the disgruntled Kayo as a distinct security risk. Sure enough, a year later Kayo opened up, saying that he could lead Justice Department officials to a Cosa Nostra burying ground in New Jersey. He himself had interred a dozen murder victims, he said, among them the long-missing Anthony ("Tony Bender") Strollo, a top-rank mobster. Kayo's outrageous demands for concessions and leniency, however, led officials to shrug off his stories as efforts to talk his way out of jail.

But even back in 1964 the gangsters knew precisely what Kayo could reveal-and what to do about it. Accordingly, on April 5, 1964, a man named Joe Celso, 50, took note of an ad placed by a farmer who wanted to sell a frontloader - a sort of mechanical scoop. Celso drove to the farmer's yard in a black Cadillac. With Celso was a swarthy, well-dressed man who remained in the car. Celso asked the price of the frontloader. Expecting that he would have to dicker with the buyer, the farmer said, "$1,000." Without a word, Celso returned to the Cadillac, whispered to the swarthy man and returned to the farmer to drop ten $100 bills into his hands. Celso asked that the frontloader be delivered the next day to his chicken farm north of Lakewood. "Come along and show me how to run it," said Celso. The farmer did so.

Almost three years elapsed before Kayo was brought from prison in New York, in February 1967, to be tried for extortion. He was convicted and faced additional sentences of up to 174 years. Again he sought leniency by offering to talk about the gang cemetery. It was, he said, on Celso's chicken farm - at the site of an illicit whisky still once operated by Zicarelli. The bodies, said Kayo, were in the wooden mash pit of the still. One, he said, was that of Strollo.

Kayo's story of the body in the basement

Another, he said, was Barney O'Brien.

Kayo led FBI agents to the mash pit. Close by he pointed out the graves of two more victims, Angelo Sonessa and Kenneth Later, whose bodies were indeed unearthed and identified by the agents. But in the pit itself the diggers found no bodies. Authorities are now convinced that the corpses of Strollo and the others had been disinterred and buried in other places at about the time Celso bought the frontloader. But they did turn up one piece of evidence at the pit: a pair of orthopedic shoes. These were traced to the Jerry Miller I.D. Shoe Company of Brockton, Mass. Officials of the company said the shoes had been ordered by Dr. Leon Linsen, of Bayonne. And Dr. Linsen said he had obtained them for Bernard O'Brien.

Kayo also repeated a story he had first related in 1965. It concerned the disposal of O'Brien's body. This, LIFE has learned, is what Kayo told the officials:

On a night in October 1962, Konigsberg was summoned by Gallagher himself to the congressman's home at 102 West Fifth Street, Bayonne. Kayo quoted Gallagher as saying, "There's something I want you to do." Kayo said that, at first, he protested: "I didn't come to you when I was in trouble." Then Gallagher led Konigsberg to the basement. There was the body of Barney O'Brien.

Kayo insisted that he didn't know how O'Brien had died. He said there were no marks on the body and that he thought O'Brien may have died of natural causes. Kayo said Gallagher asked him to get rid of the body. He said he replied that he wouldn't touch it without approval from the Mob.

According to Kayo, Gallagher then made several telephone calls. Within a few minutes a call came back for Konigsberg. It was Zicarelli, said Kayo, who told him to do what he could for Galla gher. At that point, Kayo said, he carried the body of O'Brien from Gallagher's basement, dumped it into the trunk of his auto. Then he telephoned Celso and told him to take his wife to a movie. When the Celsos had gone, Kayo said, he drove to the farm and buried O'Brien's body in the mash pit.

LIFE confronted the congressman with Konigsberg's story. Gallagher agitatedly pronounced it was "the most bizarre story I have ever heard in my life." There was no dispute over this. Later he said, "I can see why you've been nailing me for a year if you believe anything like that. Whew! Holy Christmas! I can see why you'd be damn curious about me. I would too!

"And it's preposterous," he went on, "that you would take a guy like Kayo Konigsberg and take a story like that and match that against my life."

The character of Kayo Konigsberg and the very sordidness of the O'Brien story would normally entitle a man in Gallagher's position to the benefit of the doubt. Yet the federal authorities who have checked other details of Konigsberg's disclosures have found the imprisoned killer consistently accurate.

Before asking the congressman about the Konigsberg story, the reporters had asked if O'Brien had ever been in Gallagher's home.

"Gee, I don't know that," said Gallagher. "I don't think so. But when Barney would get drunk he was liable to turn up any place and on election night all sorts of people would come into the house. But I don't think he was there then."

Q: He wasn't in vnur house on the night ... he disappeared?

A: Oh, come on . . . of course he wasn't.

Q: Do you know whether there were any telephone calls made from your house in connection with Barney's . . . [death] on or about Oct. 14, 1962? A: If there were, they were not made by me.

Q: There were no telephone calls made from your residence to Joe Zicarelli?

A: No.

Q: None?

A: Hey, let me tell you something about my house. It's open. There are literally numbers of people who have access to my house . . . they're guests. They're like the regular political kind of people that move in and out of any politician's house. Once people know you're home . . .

A reporter asked if Kayo Konigsberg had ever been in Gallagher's home. "Never," said Gallagher.

Q: Did O'Brien die in your house? A: I don't know where O'Brien died, or if he died, or anything else about O'Brien, other than what appeared in the newspapers.

Q: The question is: did he die in your house?

A: Barney O'Brien was never in my house.

[admin]

Jim Garrison
by Spartacus Educational

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James Garrison was born in Knoxville, Iowa, on 20th November, 1921. His family moved to Chicago and after Pearl Harbor Garrison joined the U.S. Army. In 1942 he took part in the fighting in Europe.

After the war Garrison attended Tulare Law School in New Orleans. He then joined the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and served as a special agent in Seattle and Tacoma. In 1954 Garrison returned to New Orleans where he became assistant district attorney.

In 1961, Garrison was elected as the city's district attorney. He developed a good reputation and in his first two years he never lost a case. According to Joan Mellen, the author of A Farewell to Justice (2005): "He hired the first woman assistant attorney in New Orleans history, Louise Korns, who had been first in her class at Tulane, and entrusted most of the research to her... Garrison's was the first office to employ full-time police investigators, among them Louis Ivon... Garrison dressed nattily in three-piece suits and he was not corrupt, rejecting the Napoleonic premise that political office was a form of private property."

Three days after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Garrison brought in David Ferrie for questioning. He had been informed by Jack Martin, a part-time private investigator, that Ferrie had known Lee Harvey Oswald and might have been involved in the assassination. Ferrie told Garrison that on the day of the assassination he had driven to Houston in order to go ice-skating. Garrison thought he was lying and handed him over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. However, after a brief interview he was released.

In 1965 Garrison was told by Hale Bloggs, a Congressman from Louisiana and a former member of the Warren Commission, that he had serious doubts that Oswald was a lone-gunman. This encouraged Garrison to read the Warren Report and books on the assassination by Mark Lane, Edward Jay Epstein and Harold Weisberg.

Garrison recruited Tom Bethell to investigate the case. He interviewed Vince Salandria who claimed that the conspirators were the CIA and military leaders who wanted to stop President Kennedy's effort to end the Cold War. He also contacted Sylvia Meagher and Mary Ferrell.

In November 1966 Garrison told a journalist, David Chandler, that he had important information on the case. Chandler told Richard Billings and in January 1967, the Life Magazine reporter arranged a meeting with Garrison. Billings told Garrison that the top management at Life had concluded that Kennedy's assassination had been a conspiracy and that "his investigation was moving in the right direction". Billings suggested that he worked closely with Garrison. According to Garrison "The magazine would be able to provide me with technical assistance, and we could develop a mutual exchange of information".

Garrison agreed to this deal and Richard Billings was introduced to staff member, Tom Bethell. In his diary Bethal reported: "In general, I feel that Billings and I share a similar position about the Warren Report. He does not believe that there was a conspiracy on the part of the government, the Warren Commission or the FBI to conceal the truth, but that a probability exists that they simply did not uncover the whole truth."

Garrison also recruited Bernardo de Torres, who had good connections with anti-Castro figures. William Turner, the author of Rearview Mirror: Looking Back at the FBI, the CIA and Other Tails (2001) has argued: "A veteran of the Bay of Pigs, De Torres showed up on Garrison's doorstep early in the probe, saying he was a private detective from Miami who wanted to help, and dropping the name of Miami DA Richard Gerstein, a friend of Garrison's, as an opener. In retrospect, Garrison remembered that every lead De Torres developed ended up in a box canyon." One of the jobs Garrison gave him was to find Eladio del Valle.

Garrison became suspicious of his motives and on 7th January, 1967, he ordered his staff "under no circumstances" to offer any information to De Torres. Four days later he wrote at the top of one of De Torres' memos: "His reliability is not established." Garrison was right to be suspicious as he later discovered he was working for the CIA. According to Gaeton Fonzi, de Torres's CIA handler was Paul Bethel. Another researcher, Larry Hancock, has argued that "It certainly appears that De Torres’ role in the Garrison investigation is suspicious, and it supports Otero’s remarks to HSCA investigators that De Torres had ‘penetrated’ Garrison’s investigation. It also shows that De Torres had an agenda of his own in addition to getting intelligence about Garrison’s investigation and investigators. That agenda involved once again shifting attention to Fidel Castro and a Cuban hit team rather than the activities of the Cuban exiles."

Garrison eventually became convinced that a group of right-wing activists, including Guy Banister, David Ferrie, Carlos Bringuier, Eladio del Valle and Clay Shaw were involved in a conspiracy with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to kill John F. Kennedy. Garrison claimed this was in retaliation for his attempts to obtain a peace settlement in both Cuba and Vietnam.

On 17th February, 1967, The New Orleans States-Item reported that Garrison was investigating the assassination of Kennedy. It also said that one of the suspects was David Ferrie. Five days later Ferrie's body was found in his New Orleans apartment. Although two suicide notes were found, the coroner did not immediately classify the death as a suicide, noting there were indications Ferrie may have suffered a brain hemorrhage.

Garrison immediately announced that Ferrie had been a part of the Kennedy conspiracy. "The apparent suicide of David Ferrie ends the life of a man who in my judgment was one of history's most important individuals. Evidence developed by our office had long since confirmed that he was involved in events culminating in the assassination of President Kennedy... We have not mentioned his name publicly up to this point. The unique nature of this case now leaves me no other course of action." Garrison added that he was making preparations to arrest Ferrie when they heard of his death. "Apparently, we waited too long."

Another suspect, Eladio del Valle, was found dead in a Miami parking lot twelve hours after Ferrie's was discovered in New Orleans. Police reported that de Valle had been tortured, shot in the heart at point-blank range, and his skull split open with an axe. His murder has never been solved. Diego Gonzales Tendera, a close friend, later claimed de Valle was murdered because of his involvement in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. A senior member of the Cuban Secret Service, Fabian Escalante, agreed: "In 1962 Eladio Del Valle tried to infiltrate Cuba with a commando group of 22 men but their boat had an English key - a little island. In the middle of 1962. Of course, we knew this. I tell you about this, because one of our agents who was one of the people helping to bring this group to Cuba, was a man of very little education. They talked English on many occasions on this little island with Eladio Del Valle told this person, on many occasions, that Kennedy must be killed to solve the Cuban problem. After that we had another piece of information on Eladio Del Valle. This was offered to us by Tony Cuesta. He told us that Eladio Del Valle was one of the people involved in the assassination plot against Kennedy."

A week after the death of David Ferrie Garrison announced the arrest of Clay Shaw. He was 54 years old and a retired businessman. John J. McCloy, a former member of the Warren Commission, was asked by a journalist what he thought about the Garrison investigation. He replied that the Warren Commission had always known that new evidence in the case might turn up. "We did not say that Oswald acted alone. We said we could find no credible evidence that he acted with anyone else."

Ramsay Clark, the new Attorney General stated that the FBI had already investigated and cleared Shaw "in November and December of 1963" of "any part in the assassination". As Garrison pointed out: "However, the statement that Shaw, whose name appears nowhere in the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission, had been investigated by the federal government was intriguing. If Shaw had no connection to the assassination, I wondered, why had he been investigated?" Within a few days of this statement Clark had to admit that he had published inaccurate information and that no investigation of Shaw had taken place.

As part of Garrison's attempt to prove the existence of a conspiracy, he subpoenaed the Zapruder Film from Time-Life Corporation. The company refused and they fought this subpoena all the way to the Supreme Court, which finally ruled that the corporation had to hand over the film. As Jim Marrs has pointed out: "Time-Life grudgingly turned over to Garrison a somewhat blurry copy of the film - but that was enough. Soon, thanks to the copying efforts of Garrison's staff, bootleg Zapruder films were in the hands of several assassination researchers."

In May, 1967 Hugh Aynesworth published a critical article of Garrison in Newsweek: "Garrison's tactics have been even more questionable than his case. I have evidence that one of the strapping D.A.'s investigators offered an unwilling "witness" $3,000 and a job with an airline - if only he would "fill in the facts" of the alleged meeting to plot the death of the President. I also know that when the D.A.'s office learned that this entire bribery attempt had been tape-recorded, two of Garrison's men returned to the "witness" and, he says, threatened him with physical harm."

Garrison later responded to Aynesworth's claims: "As for the $3,000 bribe, by the time I came across Aynesworth's revelation, the witness our office had supposedly offered it to, Alvin Babeouf, had admitted to us that it never happened. Aynesworth, of course, never explained what he did with the "evidence" allegedly in his possession. And the so-called bribery tape recording had not, in fact, ever existed."

In September, 1967, Richard Billings told Garrison that Life Magazine was no longer willing to work with him in the investigation. Billings claimed that this was because he had come to the conclusion that he had links to organized crime. Soon afterwards, Life began a smear campaign against Garrison. It was reported that Garrison had been given money by an unnamed "New Orleans mobster."

In Shaw's trial Perry Russo claimed that in September, 1963, he overheard Clay Shaw and David Ferrie discussing the proposed assassination of John F. Kennedy. It was suggested that the crime could be blamed on Fidel Castro. Russo's testimony was discredited by the revelation that he underwent hypnosis and had been administered sodium pentathol, or "truth serum," at the request of the prosecution. It claimed that Russo only came up with a link between Shaw, Ferrie and Oswald after these treatments. Shaw was eventually found not guilty of conspiring to assassinate Kennedy.

In 1973 Garrison lost the office to Harry Connick. After leaving his post as district attorney Garrison wrote a book about his investigations of the Kennedy assassination, On the Trail of the Assassins (1988). Carl Oglesby summarized Garrison's theory as follows:

(a) Rabidly anti-Communist elements of the C.I.A.'s operations division, often moving through extra-governmental channels, were deeply involved at the top of the assassination planning and management process and appear to have been the makers of the decision to kill the President.

(b) The conspiracy was politically motivated. Its purpose was to stop J.F.K.'s movement toward détente in the Cold War, and it succeeded in doing that. It must therefore be regarded as a palace coup d'etat.

(c) Oswald was an innocent man craftily set up to take the blame. As he put it, "I'm a patsy."

Several researchers were highly critical of the methods that Garrison used in his investigation. Sylvia Meagher wrote: "As the Garrison investigation continued to unfold, I had increasingly serious misgivings about the validity of his evidence, and the scrupulousness of his methods." Anthony Summers was surprised that Oliver Stone decided to base his film JFK on Garrison's work: "From a vast array of scholarship, he picked a book by Jim Garrison, former District Attorney of New Orleans, as his main source work. Garrison, many will recall, is a strange figure -- considered crazy by some, and crooked by others."

Jim Garrison died on 21st October, 1992.