Anthony Scaramucci, the former White House communications director and co-host of "The Rest Is Politics US," has publicly argued that organized crime was responsible for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. He made the case during an appearance on a podcast, where he was described as a vigorous proponent of the mob theory.
Scaramucci said he believes the mob ordered the hit and that he could identify who fired the fatal shot. He stressed that he would only discuss information already available in the public domain, saying he was protecting sources and methods from his time in the White House.
The host noted that Scaramucci claims to hold additional information he will not share. Scaramucci responded that he had held security clearances and would not answer certain questions even when pressed.
The discussion began with the motives that have long been attributed to the mob. During the 1960 election, the mob was described as instrumental in helping Kennedy win Illinois, and less famously in West Virginia, through trade unions, get-out-the-vote efforts, and in some cases fabricated votes.
A second motive centered on Attorney General Robert Kennedy. When John F. Kennedy brought his brother into the administration, Bobby's war on organized crime became official policy. Intercepts of figures such as Sam Giancana, a head of the Chicago outfit, were cited as showing mob anger at what they saw as a double cross.
A third motive involved Cuba. After the Bay of Pigs, a subset of the Florida mob was furious that Kennedy had not removed Fidel Castro. These figures wanted access to Havana's casinos and resorts and the lucrative cash flow they had enjoyed in the 1950s.
Scaramucci argued that the most plausible motive was Robert Kennedy's campaign against the mob. He held up a copy of "Carlos Marcello: The Man Behind the JFK Assassination" by Stefano Vaccara, noting that copies now sell for roughly $1,500 because the book is out of circulation.
He described Robert Kennedy as a righteous and Puritan figure determined to root out corruption, even though his father, Joseph P. Kennedy, had been a bootlegger with mob ties. Scaramucci said Joseph Kennedy wanted Bobby to lay off the mob, and quoted Jack Kennedy as telling his father that the problem with Bobby was that he thought like a cop.
Scaramucci emphasized the stroke Joseph P. Kennedy suffered in December 1961, which left him paralyzed and largely unable to speak. In his account, the stroke removed the family's ability to broker a deal with the mob, leaving Bobby free to pursue organized crime aggressively by 1963.
He pointed to the deportation of Carlos Marcello, the Louisiana mob boss, as a key moment. Marcello was flown roughly 800 miles down the Yucatan Peninsula and dropped in the jungle without his shoes, with the message that it was a message from Bobby Kennedy.
According to Scaramucci, Marcello had to bribe his way back through Mexico to his New Orleans office. Once back, he ordered the hit and sought clearance from the other families.
Scaramucci said Oliver Stone's film got the Louisiana influence right but was wrong about the CIA. He called the CIA angle massive disinformation and said the agency had nothing to do with the hit.
He also cited John McCone, who replaced Allen Dulles at the CIA after the Bay of Pigs and was a trusted adviser to both Kennedy brothers. Scaramucci argued that Lyndon Johnson's 1.3-mile walk to Arlington with Jackie Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, and Charles de Gaulle showed that the government knew Johnson was safe.
In his telling, Johnson back-channeled to the mob to make the matter go away, and the Warren Commission was assembled to put out disinformation. He said the government was embarrassed that a mob hit had killed the president during the Cold War.
The host raised the evidence around Marcello. Marcello was effectively exiled to Central America because a fake birth certificate listed his home country as Guatemala, and Robert Kennedy deported him knowing it was untrue. The trip was violent, and Marcello fainted and broke ribs.
The case linking Marcello to the assassination was said to hinge on a 1962 meeting with a private investigator. Marcello reportedly said of Bobby Kennedy that "the dog will keep biting you only if you cut off its tail," and that he planned to get a "nut" to do it.
Much of the story also rests on a deathbed confession. In 1985, while sick in prison, Marcello was said to have confessed to a fellow inmate who was an FBI informant that he had met with Lee Harvey Oswald in 1963 and ordered him to murder JFK.
Scaramucci then laid out his own two-minute account. He said the hit was first planned for Tampa on October 28, but rain and the bubble top, which was not bulletproof, prevented a clean shot. The next opportunity was November 22 in Dallas.
In his version, Oswald was one of the mob's paid men. Oswald was placed at the book depository to fire three distraction shots, while a second nest behind the grassy knoll delivered the kill shot as the president's car came around the corner.
Scaramucci said Oswald realized he would be framed and fled, later killing police officer J.D. Tippit. After Oswald was captured and beaten, he was brought to the Dallas police station and said he was just a patsy.
He said the mob then went to Jack Ruby, who had large debts, and told him to kill Oswald. In his account, Ruby agreed in exchange for his debts being erased and his family protected, and was told to keep his mouth shut.
Scaramucci argued that Oswald's transfer was delayed from 9 a.m. because the Dallas Police Department was on the take and needed Ruby in position. He called it implausible that a nightclub owner with a loaded gun could walk into the basement and shoot the most wanted fugitive in the country on national television without a setup.
He said Ruby took the story of doing it for Jackie Kennedy to his grave, but that the real purpose was to silence the patsy. In his account, Johnson knew all of this and decided the country could not admit that organized crime had killed its leader, so the lone gunman story was manufactured.
Scaramucci cited the 1978 House investigation, which he said concluded it was likely a conspiracy. He also pointed to the Zapruder film, arguing the head shot came from the front, and said that without the 8mm camera the government might have gotten away with it.
He said Johnson went to J. Edgar Hoover and that figures such as Joe DiMaggio and Frank Sinatra talked about the mob's role. He described it as well known in New York that the mob killed Kennedy.
When asked who the other shooter was, Scaramucci named Jimmy Blue Eyes, describing him as a five-foot-one Marine sniper who worked for the mob. He said the shooter took cover, lived in Florida for many years, and was protected by the mob, with a subtle agreement that no one would go after each other.
Scaramucci said DiMaggio and Sinatra knew him. He also said President Trump promised to release information related to the assassination but never released the key documents, though additional documents were made public.
The host pushed back on the connections between Oswald, Ruby, and the mob. Ruby ran a strip club in Dallas and in the weeks before the assassination made calls to mob-affiliated lawyers and mobsters, largely to resolve a dispute with the strippers union over a new club that was not using unionized strippers.
Ruby had been hanging around the police station all weekend, offering himself as a gopher to reporters, buying cops sandwiches and drinks, and was nicknamed "the creep" by reporters. He was photographed within a few feet of Oswald before shooting him on Sunday.
The host said he struggled with why Ruby waited. On Sunday morning, Oswald's transfer was delayed because he wanted clean clothes and another sweater, while Ruby was at Western Union a few blocks away sending a moneygram to a stripper because his club had been closed.
Ruby then showed up in the crowd almost as an afterthought, seemingly unaware of the transfer, but carrying a loaded gun. The host noted Ruby always had a gun.
Scaramucci dismissed the pushback as establishmentarian and said the delay was designed to get Ruby in position. He insisted the police were waiting for Ruby and that the impromptu appearance, including Ruby being in his underwear, was part of the cover.
He argued the mob were absolute professionals at killing and at creating distraction and disinformation. He said the Warren Commission did a brilliant job of putting broadly accepted information into the marketplace, and that even skeptical commentators have bought into it.
The host asked why the mob would kill the president rather than Robert Kennedy, since killing the president would bring down enormous scrutiny. Scaramucci said the book addressed this, explaining the mob thought long and hard about killing Bobby but decided it would enrage the most powerful person in the world and possibly worsen the crackdown, so they took out Jack instead.
Scaramucci called that a mistake. He said the mob should have used Judith Exner, who was having an affair with both Giancana and Jack Kennedy, to pressure the president to tell Bobby to back off.
The host described Ruby as an unlikely silencer. He said Ruby was despondent and in tears over the weekend, seen as a benign nuisance who popped up wherever there was a crowd, and on the fringes of mob affiliation. He also noted that when Ruby walked to the police station, he left his favorite dogs in his car.
Scaramucci responded that the host was leaving out a large loan to the nightclub, the erasure of Ruby's debts, and the protection of his family after he died. He repeated that the mob were experienced at creating distraction and disinformation.
Asked when and why he became focused on the case, Scaramucci said he was raised Roman Catholic and was born less than two months after Kennedy died in November 1963. He described the assassination as an unhealed wound for American Catholics, with pictures of Kennedy in Catholic homes and nuns talking about him.
He said he initially bought into the Warren Commission and was not a conspiracy theorist. But he said that if you are Italian in New York and know people who know people, you know what happened.
Scaramucci said the decision to withhold information happened in 2017, that Joe Biden looked at the information in 2021 and held it again, and that Trump promised to release everything but released thousands of pages of nothing. He said Bobby Kennedy Jr. knows none of the information came out.
He argued that if you love the country, you do not let that information out, because proving the case would reveal how the government knows and put people in harm's way. He said it would also tell adversaries how the United States does these things.
Scaramucci compared the case to John Wilkes Booth, saying Booth had others conspiring with him to kill the president and go after Secretary of State William Seward and others in the cabinet. He said a lone gunman is possible but that the conspiracy seems more likely to him.
The host noted the shooting of Donald Trump in Pennsylvania as an example of a lone gunman, saying no sign of a conspiracy or additional people was required. He said the Kennedy assassination did not need more people to have been carried out, though that does not prove there were not more.
The host said he could see the motive but wondered what could still be so sensitive that it could prove the case and cannot come out. He said mob informants or phone intercepts would not surprise him.
Scaramucci declined to answer that question, saying he loved the hosts but would not answer it. He said he had held security clearances and would not go there.
The host joked about a "holy trinity" of lone gunman theory, naming the co-hosts and Dominic Sandbrook. One host said he was agnostic and open to being convinced there was something more.
Scaramucci returned to the Zapruder film, saying the first bullet hit Kennedy in the chest cavity below the neck and the second hit him, with the bullet coming in through the front while Oswald was behind him. He said he had studied the film, which captures the entire shooting.
He noted the public did not see the film in the 1960s, and that when it came out in the 1970s the House established a committee to investigate the assassination. He asked the host what the House concluded in 1978.
The host said the House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that President Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. He added that the conclusion was based on acoustics work done in the 1970s that has since been debunked.
Scaramucci praised the podcast for explaining the underbelly of information, but said intelligence is probabilistic. He said presidential daily briefs do not speak in certainties, citing the example of Osama bin Laden, where analysts did not know 100 percent that he was in the house.
He said he believes his account is 100 percent true, but that if he were the hosts he would say it is probably 90 percent true, as Vaccara does. He called it the most obvious thing that happened based on the evidence and the Zapruder film.
The host asked whether the U.S. government could really keep such a secret for 60 years. Scaramucci said the CIA is great at this, and that giving the public all the information is a way to keep them uninformed.
He said Marcello claimed he ordered Oswald to kill Kennedy, which he called half a lie, because Oswald was involved but never killed him. He said the full ghost of the whole thing is never given up.
Scaramucci said it does not matter anymore whether people believe it. He said the president should never have been killed by those guys, and that many things happened, including the stroke by Joseph P. Kennedy, which he said is never factored into the story.
He concluded that had Joseph P. Kennedy not suffered the stroke in December 1961, the president would probably have finished his term. The host wrapped up the interview, and Scaramucci thanked the show and said he loved it.