Contract on America: The Mafia Murder of President John F. Kennedy

By David E. Scheim $19.95

Shapolsky Publishers, Inc. 480 pp.

FEW events help us to place ourselves in the continuum of American history so much as the assassination, almost a quarter-century ago, of President John F. Kennedy '40. A dividing line between prosperity, tranquility and peace on the one side, and Vietnam, inflation and internal unrest on the other, Camelot's violent ending marks the time when the American Century suddenly lost its innocence and optimism.

The symbolic importance of Kennedy's assassination explains our morbid fascination with his death. Though only a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, was blamed for Kennedy's murder, since 1963, books accusing the Cubans, the Mafia, and even the CIA have become a veritable cottage industry. The worst of these have had all the marks of crack-pot conspiracy theories, delegitimizing the conclusion reached even by a 1979 government committee that Kennedy probably was the victim of a conspiracy.

And now comes David Scheim's Contract on America: The Mafia Murder of President John F. Kennedy, already in at least its fourth printing, even though its official publication date was early this month. One hopes that, barring the increasingly unlikely discovery of new evidence, Scheim's exhaustively-researched will bring an end to the genre.

Scheim, who has a doctorate in mathematics, pored over government reports and documents, previous books, and newspaper accounts with unusual patience and a fine eye for detail. And in doing so, he has marshalled a considerable body of evidence showing that members of the Mafia planned and carried out the assassination of our 35th president.

Scheim has been researching the Kennedy assassination for 15 years. His interest in the killing seems long ago to have become obsessive, which both accounts for the book's repetetiveness and goes a long way toward explaining its strengths. The book is spectacularly well-documented, with almost every sentence of the text scrupulously foot-noted. And anyone with more than a passing interest in the Mafia will want to scour Scheim's bibliography, which includes a vast range of writings about La Cosa Nostra, an organization that guards its secrets with deadly jealousy.

But Scheim's book is not without faults. Originally published as a scholarly work meant for purchase by libraries, Scheim's book reads laboriously, suffering from an odd and unhappy mixture of stilted, technical prose and journalistic colloquialisms. Moreover, Scheim recycles his evidence again and again, giving many passages an unwelcome sense of deja vu, and he includes much irrelevant information.

His errors are ones of substance as well as style. Scheim expertly rehashes previous arguments linking the Mafia to JFK's assassination, but it is difficult to tell which, if any, of his arguments are really new. In addition, Scheim rests his case on a tenuous and largely speculative connection between Oswald and the Mafia.

SCHEIM argues that in the first two years of his administration, Kennedy roused the ire of the Mob for authorizing his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, to crack down harshly on organized crime. In addition, the Mafia was enraged at the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion, which left Fidel Castro free to shut down Mob-run businesses in Cuba. Ordinarily, Scheim writes, the Mafia would not dare put out a contract on a president, but Kennedy had "slept with" the Mob, using his Mafia connections to meet Judith Campbell, who engaged in affairs simultaneously with the president and a well-known gangster.

Citing government committee testimony, Scheim argues that Carlos Marcello, head of a famous Mafia family based in New Orleans, decided to have the president murdered. In keeping with a strategy the Mafia occasionally used, Scheim suggests, Marcello chose a hitman not easily identifiable as a Mob associate.

The man for the job, Scheim asserts, was Lee Harvey Oswald, whose uncle was a member of La Cosa Nostra. Oswald, shooting from a book depository building, would take the fall for Kennedy's death. But, following an old theory, Scheim writes that the angle at which the bullet hit Kennedy indicates that it came from behind a stockade fence on Kennedy's right slightly ahead of his limousine--meaning that Oswald was not responsible for the deadly shot.

Scheim's account on this point is impressive. He cites the statements of people viewing Kennedy's motorcade in front of the fence, who felt the bullets just above their heads and even dropped to the ground to evade the shots. Moreover it was to the grassy knoll in front of the fence that police first gravitated in their search for Kennedy's assassin. If there were at least two gunmen, then it seems hard to deny that it was a group of conspirators who killed the president.

In Oswald's death, at the hands of Dallas nightclub owner Jack Ruby, Scheim sees an attempt by the Mafia to cover its tracks by preventing Oswald from divulging what he knew. Much of the argument here stems from Scheim's documentation of Ruby's underworld activity, including illegal gambling schemes, narcotics trafficking and prostitution.

Scheim's critical examination of Ruby's testimony before the Warren Commission accounts for some of his book's most remarkable passages. Ruby hinted broadly that he was part of the Mob, that members of the Dallas Police Department co-operated in his murder of Oswald, and that as he was testifying, his life was in grave danger. It is a hair-raising experience to read through Ruby's continued pleading that the hearings be moved to Washington, where he might speak with somewhat less fear of being murdered on the spot.

The Warren Commission, working shortly after Kennedy's death, found that there was no proof that Ruby had connections to the Mob. Like some previous authors, Scheim accuses members of the commisssion of intentionally passing over evidence of Mafia involvement in the assassination, and he finds sparse but suggestive evidence to support his claim. After reading this book, one finds it clear that the Warren Commission's failure to recognize Ruby's ties reflects either spectacular incompetence or sinister motives.

Another especially well-done portion of Contract on America is Scheim's enumeration of the deaths, under suspicious circumstances, of a dozen key witnesses and inquisitive journalists. The author's focus ranges from the prostitute who, days before the assassination, tried to warn authorities of the threat to the president's life, to the aging Mafia figure who was killed and dismembered after he told journalists that Ruby was "one of our boys." A spate of these stories, told with glorious, gory detail, makes for chilling reading indeed.

But most of this book is neither exciting nor novel. Scheim's chief accomplishment is having assembled, in a somewhat awkward manner, all the evidence supporting his hypothesis, tired though it is. If it cannot be said that Scheim has proved conclusively that it was the Mafia that murdered Kennedy, at least it now seems that the burden of proof lies with those who say otherwise.