by Wayne Madsen
August 13, 2015
from Infowars Website

 

During the recent Republican presidential candidates' "debate" in Cleveland, former Florida Governor John Ellis Bush (JEB) wanted to recount his eight years as governor of the Sunshine State.

However, it is not Bush the politician who should be of interest to voters but Bush the Central Intelligence Agency "non-official cover" banker in Venezuela and Miami-based real estate businessman/money launderer who should alarm the American electorate.
 

Credit: iprphoto / Flickr
 

While Jeb's brother, George W. Bush, glossed over his AWOL status with the Texas Air National Guard, Jeb does not have a military record to defend but he does have a CIA employment record to fess up to.

Jeb's early work in Venezuela and south Florida is much more troubling than Dubya pretending to be on active duty in Texas while he was actually off in Alabama helping a GOP U.S. Senate campaign and getting sloppy drunk in redneck bars.

Jeb should fully explain his relationship with Alberto Duque, a Colombian national who laundered drug money for the Medellin and Cali Narco-Cartels and Nicaraguan Contras while serving as owner of City National Bank of Miami and president of the General Coffee Company of Colombia.

Apparently, there was more than coffee arriving in sacks of coffee coming into Miami from Colombia. Duque financed a $30 million real estate development project run by Jeb Bush.

In 1983, Duque was convicted for fraud and sent to federal prison. Duque hired a Bush family CIA crony to serve as City National Bank's president.

He was Don Beazley, who previously worked for the CIA's Nugan Hand Bank in Australia.

Before it collapsed, Nugan Hand was responsible for laundering money from the CIA's Golden Triangle opium and heroin smuggling operations from Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle and paying off U.S. surrogates in Asia, including,

• Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines

• Suharto in Indonesia

• Park Chung Hee in South Korea,

...and various Thai generals.

In return for CIA money gifts, Marcos ordered his Energy Minister, Geronimo Velasco, to have the Philippines National Oil Corporation enter into business relationships with three Bush family-owned businesses:

• Zapata Petroleum Corporation

• Zapata Offshore Company

• Overbey Oil Development Corporation

The three Bush firms were also linked to various CIA activities, including the abortive 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.

Jeb Bush's Texas Commerce Bank was also the bank used by the Zapata companies. Velasco died of a sudden heart attack in San Francisco in 2007. Velasco's Republic Glass Corporation became a holding company that owned a number of British Virgin Islands-based subsidiaries.

Beazley had also been president of Great American Bank of Miami. The bank was indicted for drug money laundering in 1982. Beazley also negotiated the sale of Second National Bank of Homestead, a subsidiary of Great American, to Nugan Hand.

It was in this environment of interconnected CIA money laundering banks that Jeb Bush found himself and his real estate business immersed in the 1980s.

On January 25, 1980, Frank Nugan, the Australian co-founder of Nugan Hand Bank, was found dead in his car near Bowenfels, New South Wales from a "self-inflicted" rifle shot wound to his head.

The card of ex-CIA director William Colby, who, himself was found floating in Chesapeake Bay, Maryland in 1996, was found in Nugan's pocket.

Colby was Nugan Hand's legal counsel. Hand had planned to move with his wife and three young children to Florida but someone apparently did not like the idea of Nugan showing up in Florida during the year George H W Bush was trying to become the president of the United States.

After serving as vice president for Texas Commerce Bank in Caracas from 1977 to 1979, Bush joined his father's presidential campaign in 1980. Serving with Bush on the campaign was the CIA official who gave him his in-brief at Langley in 1977, Robert Gambino, the deputy director of security at the agency.

In the 1980s, Jeb Bush provided liaison between his father's national security adviser, Donald Gregg, and various Florida-based right-wing Nicaraguan and Cuban exile organizations helping to fight the clandestine war against the Sandinista government of Nicaragua.

Jeb was appointed by his father to the board of the National Republican Institute, the GOP branch of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), the CIA-financed money laundering operation that saw millions pour into the coffers of the Nicaraguan contras, Cuban exile groups, and Salvadorean, Guatemalan, and Honduran death squads.

Jeb acted as a liaison between Dr. Mario Castejon, a right-wing candidate for president of Guatemala, and Vice President Bush. Castejon sought funding for a secret shipment of arms to the contras and other right-wing rebel groups in Central America that would be masked as "medical supplies."

Jeb Bush's relationship with City National Bank, whose other senior director was Leonard Abess, a director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Foundation, ensured that a large share of NED money flowed to Israeli security firms like Tadiran, which helped Guatemala and Honduras track down leftist guerrillas and exterminate them.

Jeb Bush's current support for Israel stems from his early business relationships with Zionists like Abess and other offshoots of the Meyer Lansky "Kosher Nostra" crime family in south Florida. Abess is currently a member of the Federal Reserve Bank branch of Miami.

Jeb's thank you letter to Gambino after his 1977 CIA in-briefing at Langley.

Texas Commerce Bank was owned by the family of James Baker, an early George H W Bush adviser as well as close friend.

It could be argued that Jeb Bush, from his in-brief by Gambino at the CIA in 1977, to his unsuccessful run for governor of Florida in 1994 was a reliable CIA and Israeli asset.

In 1990, Jeb urged his father to pardon Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch, a man wanted for the 1976 bombing of a Cuban civilian passenger plane that had taken off from Bridgetown, Barbados.

Jeb Bush was also a supporter of the U.S. House of Representatives candidacy of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, one of the most rabid anti-Castro and pro-Israeli members of Congress.

Jeb also succeeded in having his father name Dexter Lehtinen, Ileana's husband, to be U.S. Attorney for Southern Florida.

Lehtinen permitted a number of Jeb's friends in the Cuban and Jewish communities in southern Florida to escape prosecution for crimes ranging from drug money laundering to narcotics smuggling and contract assassinations to banking fraud.

Most of Jeb's business friends were CIA-linked bankers. In addition to Beazley, Duque, and Abess, these included Paul Helliwell, a Miami-based lawyer and the owner of two CIA money laundering banks,

• Great American Bank of Miami, later bought by Nugan Hand and indicted in 1982 for drug money laundering

• Castle Bank & Trust Ltd. of Nassau in the Bahamas

Helliwell, a veteran of the Office of Strategic Security (OSS) during World War II, died at the age of 62 on Christmas Eve of 1976, just a few weeks before George H W Bush departed as CIA director.

The autopsy said Helliwell died from "complications of emphysema." Castle Bank shut down in 1977, the same year that Jeb moved to Caracas to work for Texas Commerce Bank.

An affiliated bank that shared directors with Castle Bank, Mercantile Bank & Trust of Freeport, Bahamas, also suspended operations in 1977.

Castle Bank, which had laundered CIA money to pay off such dictators as,

• Marcos in the Philippines

• Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic

• Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua,

...saw much of its revenue initially come from Nationalist Chinese drug smugglers operating out of the Golden Triangle in Southeast Asia.

In addition to Nassau, Helliwell's Castle Bank operated out of the Cayman Islands and Panama. Among the bank's account holders were the Pritzker family of Chicago, which owns the Hyatt Hotel chain, and the daughter of President Chiang Kai-shek of Taiwan.

Between 1964 and 1975, Helliwell's major CIA front company, Sea Supply Corporation, ran covert military operations against Cuba from Andros Island, the largest island in the Bahamas.

Jeb's business deals also put him in close contact with two other Florida banks, Northside Bank of Miami, owned by the Cali Cartel, and the Popular Bank and Trust Company, once owned by Nicaragua's Somoza but transferred to CIA control after his assassination by Sandinista commandos in Paraguay in 1980.

After his return from Caracas to Florida in 1979, Jeb befriended the right-wing Nicaraguan community as much as he did the right-wing exiled Cubans.

Much of the billions of dollars that the Somoza family stole from Nicaragua ended up in CIA-connected banks that helped finance Jeb's many real estate and other ventures.
 

Jeb Bush as CIA "NOC" in the late 1970s.

Is Jeb Bush [left circled] at the 1980 funeral of ex-Nicaraguan fascist dictator

Anastasio Somoza at Miami's Woodlawn Park Cemetery?

Others in attendance included U.S. Representatives Larry McDonald (D-GA)

and John Murphy (D-NY).

Somoza was assassinated by a Sandinista car bomb in Asuncion, Paraguay.

The explosion left only Somoza's feet intact.
 

One of Gambino's last acts as the CIA's director of security was to preserve the myriad of CIA special clearance categories, including those that permitted NOCs like Jeb Bush and drug- and arms-smuggling proprietary companies and money laundering banks to flourish.

The Carter administration had ordered the intelligence community to reduce its compartmented access system with over 50 code words to just five special code word compartments by July 1980. The National Security Agency and Gambino balked and the new system, code named APEX, never materialized.

When Jeb's father became vice president in 1981, APEX was scrapped for the original system, which saw the number of special compartments grow in number in order to accommodate operations that included trading weapons for hostages with Iran and covertly funding the Nicaraguan contras.

One CIA official who was alarmed over APEX was the man who CIA director George H W Bush named as deputy director for covert operations in 1976, Ted Shackley, aka the "Blond Ghost."

Shackley was an old colleague of George H W Bush stemming from his days as the station chief of JMWAVE, the Miami CIA office dedicated to overthrow Fidel Castro in Cuba.

It was there that Shackley and Bush became involved with Cuban exile and mafia parties that were later tied to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas in 1963.

The "Cuba thing" was mentioned by President Richard Nixon on Oval Office tapes subpoenaed in the Watergate scandal. It is now known that the "Cuba thing" was code for the assassination of Kennedy and the CIA's involvement in the operation.

Shackley was also involved with Donald Gregg in the Phoenix assassination program in South Vietnam and Project FUBELT, the CIA operation to overthrow President Salvador Allende of Chile on September 11, 1973.

An undated TOP SECRET memo to Shackley from a CIA official whose name is redacted but believed to be Gambino provides details of Shackley and the CIA's security division opposition to APEX.

The memo states:

"there is no intention of establishing under the Community Security Group responsibility for a centralized computerized data base of all SCI [Sensitive Compartmented Information] approvals.

 

The CSG has no functional role in this area at this time, and one is planned for the future. The CIA Special Security Center's Compartmented Information Branch is the home of the community service on special access certifications and records. They handle SPECLE...

 

Any effort to upgrade the SPECLE system is years away. Further, NSA has taken no steps toward inputting their COMINT clearances."

In other words, the policy of President Jimmy Carter and his CIA director, Admiral Stansfield Turner, to limit CIA special compartments and display more accountability was being undermined by two Bush embeds in Langley:

Gambino and Shackley.

Shackley and Gambino were eventually forced by Turner to retire.

The almost limitless penchant of the CIA to create special compartments permitted assets like Jeb Bush at the Texas Commerce Bank and Barack Obama, Jr. at Business International Corporation to evade public scrutiny as CIA employees.

In a January 24, 1980 memo, to Gambino from the CIA member of the APEX Steering Group, special compartments are described as as protecting "industrial" personnel working for the CIA, NSA, and Defense Intelligence Agency.

Shackley became involved in the "October Surprise" plot by Bush and William Casey against Carter, also known as the "arms-for-no-hostages" conspiracy. Gambino joined the 1980 Bush for President and, later, the Reagan-Bush campaign.

According to Jeff Stein, writing for Newsday's July 25, 1980 issue, joining Gambino on the campaign were at least 40 other ex-CIA officers hired by Bush and Casey.

Jeb Bush's rise to financial and political power in Florida is coupled with a trail of,

• dead bodies

• failed banks and savings

• loan institutions accused of laundering money for the CIA,

...and dubious characters who served as CIA assets.

Until Jeb Bush fully accounts for his business activities in the 1970s, 80s, and early 90s, he is actually more unfit for the presidency than his draft-dodging and AWOL status brother, George W. Bush...

 



-   SPECIAL REPORT - UPDATE   -
Jeb Bush Received Comprehensive CIA Briefing

...when he Worked for Bank in Caracas

by Wayne Madsen

June 12-14, 2015

from WayneMadsenReport Website

WMR has obtained a copy of a letter sent to the Central Intelligence Agency by Jeb Bush when he served as the top official of Texas Commerce Bank in Caracas, Venezuela.

On April 8, 2015, WMR first reported on the possibility that Bush, a recent college graduate, may have served as a CIA "non-official cover" (NOC) agent in Venezuela. The revelation about Bush's past links to the CIA comes two days before his expected announcement in Miami that he is a candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination.

A June 7, 1977 letter on Texas Commerce Bank stationery from "Jeb Bush" of the bank's International Banking Division, using post office box 2558 in Houston, to Robert W. Gambino, director of security for the CIA thanks Gambino, who was in charge of issuing clearances for CIA official cover and NOC agents alike, for "arranging such a comprehensive and informative briefing" for Bush during his recent trip to Washington.

Bush also wrote,

"I now understand why my father says that your agency has the most dedicated and professional group of people with which he has ever been associated."

Bush again thanked Gambino and his associates for seeing him.

Upon entering office on January 20, 1977, President Jimmy Carter refused a request from George H. W. Bush that he be retained as CIA director. Instead, Carter chose his Annapolis classmate, Admiral Stansfield Turner, to take the helm at Langley.

Although Turner dismissed a number of Bush clandestine service loyalists, many remained in the CIA's infrastructure. Update: One of the Bush loyalists was Gambino, the CIA security director who arranged for Jeb Bush's comprehensive briefing. In 1980, Gambino retired from the CIA to work for George H. W. Bush's presidential campaign.

The elder Bush rewarded Gambino in 1991 when he was appointed director of the Selective Service, which registers young men for a potential draft.

 

In April of this year, WMR reported:

"One of the last things then-Central Intelligence Agency director George H. W. Bush did for his son Jeb, whose actual name is John Ellis Bush from which the 'Jeb' is derived as an acronym, is to have him hired by the international division of the Texas Commerce Bank as a CIA 'non-official cover officer or 'NOC.'

 

Texas Commerce Bank was an optimal cover for CIA activities. The bank was founded by the family of James Baker.

 

All the elder Bush had to do was to call his close friend Baker to have his son hired by the bank's international division, the usual branch where CIA NOCs were placed within banks and investment firms.

 

Other banks used by the CIA for NOC embeds included,

• Bank of America

• Chase Manhattan Bank

• Manufacturers Hanover

Texas Commerce Bank, bought by Chemical Bank in 1987 and which is now part of J.P Morgan Chase, had the right pedigree to enable it to work closely with the CIA.

 

In 1977, its board members included Lady Bird Johnson and the recently-defeated President Gerald Ford.

 

In the 1980s, Kenneth Lay, who founded the CIA-connected Enron, became a board member of Texas Commerce Bank. Howard Hughes's CIA-linked Summa Corporation used Texas Commerce Bank to purchase a number of properties on the Las Vegas strip."

Hughes also held major accounts at the bank.

A vanity book marking Texas Commerce Bank's centenary in 1986 and commissioned by bank president Ben Love in 1981 describes the bank's cozy relationship with George W. Bush and his Zapata Off-Shore Company.

Zapata was linked to the CIA's abortive Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961. In 1985, Love also served on President Ronald Reagan's "President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control," also known as the Grace Commission.

The book describes how the,

"major predecessor of Texas Commerce, Texas National Bank," played a "significant role in helping finance the early development of Zapata Off-Shore Company... which grew to national prominence beginning in the mid-1950s."

The book also states,

"George Bush, who later became vice-president of the United States, and J. Hugh Liedtke, subsequently the head of Pennzoil, formed Zapata Petroleum Corporation with headquarters in Houston in 1953, the same year Texas National Bank (TNB) was created through the merger of South Texas National and Union National Bank.

TNB quickly established mutually profitable working ties with Zapata Off-Shore Company, an 80 percent-owned subsidiary of Zapata Petroleum... Loans from Texas National to Zapata for drilling rigs and vessels to tend to the rigs established the growing company as one of the bank's most significant oil-related accounts in the late 1950s."

Three ships owned by Zapata and which were financed by TNB - the Houston, Barbara J, and Zapata - were loaned by George H. W. Bush's firm to the CIA for the 1961 invasion by exiled Cuban mercenaries of Cuba.

Not coincidentally, the Bay of Pigs invasion was code-named OPERATION ZAPATA by the CIA.

Texas Commerce Bank officials often rubbed shoulders with Zapata officials at the swank Houston Club during Jeb Bush's two year stint in Caracas.

It was not unusual to see Zapata's vice president for international operations H. Merle Myers at club events with,

• John Whitmore, chairman of the board

• Kenneth M. Williams, senior vice president

• Henry F. LeMieux, director

• Thomas Dean Hogan, vice president of the Trust Department

• John West, executive vice president of Texas Commerce Bank

Other oil executives who frequented the club were those from,

• Halliburton

• Pennzoil

• Exxon

• Texaco

• Shell

• Amerada Hess

• Brown & Root

• Gulf Oil

• Ashland Oil

In 1977, these and other Houston Club members would also welcome back to their fold longtime member George H.W. Bush who moved back to Houston following his year as CIA director.

Bush entered the University of Texas in 1971 after graduating from Andover in Massachusetts where his academic record was less than stellar.

Bush was forced to redo the ninth grade at Andover. However, at the University of Texas, Bush majored in Latin American Studies and graduated in a phenomenal two-and-a half-years.

 An October 8, 1976 memo to the CIA's Deputy Director for Operations Training cites the University of Texas graduate program as a favored recruiting ground for the CIA. The CIA's Southwest Regional recruiter spoke to some 50 graduate students and faculty at the LBJ School of Public Affairs about careers in the CIA.

However, as the memo notes, the recruiter warned a reporter for the University of Texas daily newspaper covering the talk that certain information "should be off the record."

The reporter agreed to the CIA's terms. One of those present was Dr. Sydney Weintraub, a former deputy Secretary of State and deputy administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

The CIA recruiter also targeted graduate students and faculty at the University Center for Asian Studies and the center's director, Dr. P. Tomasson Jannuzi.

George H. W. Bush was CIA director during the agency's full court press recruiting effort at the Austin campus.

In 1977, a short time after his father left the CIA as director, Jeb, fluent in Spanish as a result of his time as an exchange student in Guadalajara, was sent, along with his Mexican wife Columba, to Caracas, Venezuela to work as a 'branch manager' and 'vice president' at the young age of 24.

But Jeb was no ordinary 'branch manager.' He was, officially, Texas Commerce Bank's top point man in the Venezuelan capital and, unofficially, the CIA's main financial liaison to the Venezuelan oil industry and the Colombian narcotics cartels.

Jeb Bush's dalliance with the covert world of CIA off-shore financing would introduce him to important future political benefactors and those who would help shape his brother George W. Bush's eight year presidency.

Continuing our report from April 8, 2015:

"[James] Baker sold Texas Commerce Bank's Houston skyscraper to the head of the National Commercial Bank of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Khalid bin Mahfouz, in 1985.

 

Bin Mahfouz was later identified as a key member of Saudi Arabia's support network for the 9/11 terrorist attacks against the United States, which is noted in the still-classified 28 pages of U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee Report on 9/11 intelligence failures.

 

Bin Mahfouz, who lived in the River Oaks section of Houston near George H.W. Bush, died suddenly in 2009 at the age of 59. Bin Mahfouz, who was also an Irish citizen, threatened with confiscatory lawsuits any publication that reported his links to 9/11 and his family ties to Osama bin Laden.

Jeb had no problems with the Venezuelan government in providing financial support for the Colombian cartels.

 

For much of Jeb's stay in Venezuela, the extremely corrupt Carlos Andres Perez, known as 'CAP,' was president. His extravagant spending using Venezuela's revenue from the recently-nationalized oil industry earned his government the nickname of 'Saudi Venezuela.'

 

Although CAP nationalized the oil industry and created the Petroleos de Venezuela (PdVSA) state-owned oil firm, he also was generous to American firms bidding for work with PdVSA.

 

One of them was Bechtel Corporation, the firm of future Reagan-Bush cabinet members George P. Shultz and Caspar Weinberger. With a number of Bechtel employees in Venezuela, Jeb was not the only CIA 'NOC' present in the country. But, he was the most influential.

A CIA report about Venezuela's growing international ties in 1977 was prepared during Jeb Bush's assignment in Caracas.

 

Titled 'Venezuelan Internationalism: Oil and Influence,' dated July 1977 and classified Confidential, the report warns against Venezuela's,

'unprecedented series of agreements with Central American, Caribbean, and Andean countries' and its vigorous 'global dialogue between the developing and developed countries.'

The report also warned that Andres Perez expanded Venezuela's new foreign policy orientation from that of his predecessor Rafael Caldera and "identified himself personally with Third World aspirations."

 

The CIA report indicated particular alarm by Langley over Andres Perez's November 1976 trip to the Soviet Union and another trip to the Middle East in April 1977. What particularly irritated the CIA was Perez's plan to ship Venezuela's oil to Cuba - petroleum that was normally supplied by the Soviet Union - in return for the Soviets supplying the oil normally destined for Cuba, to Western Europe, particularly Italy, thus reducing transportation costs for all parties concerned.

At the center of all the high-stakes oil politics in Caracas was Jeb Bush.

During CAP's second term as president from 1989 to 1993, a young army officer named Hugo Chavez attempted to overthrow the corrupt CAP in a coup.

 

Many of Venezuela's elite who Jeb befriended during his days as Langley's main NOC in Caracas later became involved with repeated CIA attempts to overthrow Chavez and his successor, Nicolas Maduro.

 

Today, they and their progeny live in the Miami-Dade area, particularly in Doral, nicknamed 'Doralzuela,' and are among Jeb's strongest and most deep-pocketed political supporters.

In 1989, CAP crushed popular protests against his government by killing as many as 3000 protesters. The massacre is known as the 'Caracazo' massacre. After leaving office the second time, Andres Perez was convicted of corruption and sentenced to 28 months in prison.

After leaving Venezuela in 1980 to help with his father's presidential and vice presidential campaigns, Jeb hooked up with Cuban-American Miami businessman Armando Codina, who had his own connections with CIA-supported anti-Castro Cuban exiles in south Florida.

 

It was Codina who helped Jeb make millions of dollars in the real estate business and eventually help launch him on his political career that took him to the Governor's Mansion in Tallahassee. Jeb, as a principal of the Codina Group, was able to arrange the sale of high-priced condos and mansions in the Miami area to his elite friends in Venezuela, with Jeb receiving handsome sales commissions.

One of Jeb's close Miami associates was Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch.

Bosch was a key figure in the CIA's Operation Condor, which was an alliance of Latin American military dictatorships that targeted leftist leaders for assassination across international borders.

 

From his base in Caracas, Bosch helped carry out the October 1976 bombing of Cubana Airlines flight 455, which was en route from Barbados to Jamaica. All 73 passengers and crew were killed in the attack, including children and the Cuban fencing team.

The Cubana bombing plot was discussed at a 1976 meeting in Washington between Bosch, another Cuban terrorist, Luis Posada Carriles, and Michael Townley of the CIA.

Jeb's father, the CIA director, was fully aware of the plot, as well as another plot to kill former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier.

 

Letelier and Roni Moffitt, his American associate, were killed when their car exploded on Sheridan Circle in front of the Irish embassy in Washington on September 21, 1976, a few weeks before the Cubana airliner was blown out of the sky off Barbados.

Codina, Bosch, and Posada Carriles were all part of Jeb's inner circle of friends, which also included Cuban businessman Camilo Padreda, a former spy for Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, and Hernandez Cartaya, both later indicted for systematically embezzling funds from the Jefferson Savings and Loan of McAllen, Texas.

 

Padreda and Cartaya were also identified as CIA agents who helped skim funds from Jefferson and other S&Ls to fund the Nicaraguan contras.

 

Jeb's work for the CIA in Caracas in 1977 came a few months after the CIA's worst terrorism spree in history, which also happened to coincide with George H.W. Bush's single year of 1976 as CIA director.

After his father became Vice President, Jeb served as the liaison for the Nicaraguan contras and he arranged meetings between them and their supporters, as well as to the White House point man for covert assistance to the Nicaraguan rebels, one Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel by the name of Oliver North.

 

Another one of Jeb's Cuban cronies, Miguel Recarey, owner of Miami-based International Medical Center, an HMO, was awash in ill-gotten Medicare funds.

 

Recarey and his brother, who had close ties to the CIA, were also funded by Florida Mafia boss Santo Trafficante, Jr., a co-conspirator in several CIA plots to assassinate Fidel Castro and a suspected co-plotter in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.