Welcome to JFK and The Enduring Secret.

I'm your host, Jeff Crudell.

I'm your host, Jeff Crudell. The Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. Today's episode is episode 233, and yes, we're going to jump right back in to more discussion about the radical right.

But let me set the plate a little bit before we get going. For anyone who has studied the Kennedy assassination,

it's not a surprising thing to learn that the mafia did work for the government. Think back to the

origins of that in World War II. It was a murky world back then as our country emerged from

post-World War II.

Lucky Luciano and his crew had helped the government rat out Nazi subversives on the docks of New York, Nazi sympathizers and spies who gave away information about American convoys,

information that contributed to a slaughter of merchant ships in the early days of our

entry into World War II. You know, the mafiososos who stopped this onslaught saw themselves

as patriots too, contributing in their own way to the victory by the U.S. in the war.

That was most certainly the beginning of an interesting

arranged marriage of sorts between organized crime and the United States government

when it comes to covert activity. Yes, after that more famous series of touches during

World War II, the occasions were likely

under very limited circumstances. For example, as the operative arm of the CIA doing the dirty

work of domestic hits, limited perhaps, but still there. Now, I'm not referring here

specifically to the assassination of the president.

I am referring to a more routine involvement with one another on the kind of black ops that

occurred domestically in those years right after the war. But the mafia was not the only group

that hung around with the CIA and the likes of them in the day.

It was more like the bar scene in a Star Wars movie.

...