RFK. He went to a beach house on Long Island where he met with one of the Costello lieutenants. It was just the two of them. “This meeting never happened,” the young Costello soldier told the nation’s highest-ranking law enforcement officer. That’s what Abby told Walter Bobby had told her. Costello’s man, who insisted he be called only Dante, explained that an important family in the old country asked New York for a special favor. They wanted to contract with the Chicago people for a hit. Dante said they were never told who the target was or where or when this would occur. “We couldn’t refuse,” he told Kennedy. Their service was only that of an intermediary, an act of respect and kindness. “Never, never in a million years did we think this thing would involve your brother, the President.” That’s what Dante told Kennedy.
“He was telling the truth,” Abby said to Walter. “When I realized that Costello had misunderstood everything, that he thought the Rosselli crowd had killed the President, I knew Costello really knew nothing. And I knew the mob was in the clear. They did Jack Ruby all right, but they had no clue why, not when they agreed to do it. Of course, by the time Ruby shot Oswald, they had to know it had something to do with President Kennedy. Costello, and his capos, felt betrayed, used. These people are very patriotic, in their own way. Killing the President was out of bounds, like killing your mother. Killing Oswald, on the other hand, was just business. And, by then it was a matter of honor.”
With the mob no longer a suspect, out of the picture, for five years Abby chased other leads. She told Walter she couldn’t remember how many people she went after. “Everything,” she said. “We rejected nothing out of hand.” Who knew who, or what, or why? Who knew someone else who knew something-something that seemed important? Every theory was checked and then checked again. Assassination conspiracies ran amok in the press, in the media, in books and periodicals, not only here, but worldwide. The CIA killed Kennedy because he was about to abandon Vietnam. The Joint Chiefs did it. No, it was J. Edgar Hoover. Or the Cubans. Maybe the Russians. Abby covered every one. She looked at homegrown racist crackpots in the South, white supremacists out West. Abby went after everyone ever mentioned as having even the slimmest motive. She chased FBI agents, CIA case officers, even a few Dallas cops themselves. Every lead was treated as a good one. At one point she spent three months digging into a tiny cult of radical Catholics in Rhode Island. This bunch thought a Catholic in the White House would bring the Pope to power in the United States. They were beside themselves when it didn’t turn out that way and they despised Jack Kennedy for it. She investigated them all, even Lyndon Johnson and his motley crew of Texas associates. “God, Bobby hated that man,” Abby told Walter. Each time she found a string, she pulled it. And every time that string led to another, she pulled it too. Sooner or later, every string came to an end. None revealed the killer.
On a winter afternoon in early 1968, Abby O’Malley and Robert Kennedy sat in a small den in a house in Hyannisport. A fire from four big logs warmed them against the New England snowstorm raging outside. They were alone. A few months earlier, before the leaves changed and the temperatures plummeted, she asked him for a list of individuals, private citizens with no government or political affiliations, a list she told Bobby might contain the name that eluded them, the name of the assassin. Where else could they look?
“We’ve gone through everyone else,” she said to him. “We should look at it as if it might have been a private matter. It might have been.” The list was a short one.
Jack Kennedy was a man. Like most men, he had made enemies along the way. But, also like most men, none of his personal enemies seemed to be people who would actually try to kill him. Besides, who could kill the President of the United States? Who could manage it? With two exceptions, the men on what Abby came to call the Private List were all contemporaries of JFK. One of the two who were not was an old man, a long-ago business partner of Kennedy’s father. Bobby said this man indeed hated Jack, hated him since his brother was a young man- since he was at Harvard. Remembering it, Robert Kennedy laughed, as did Abby as she told the story to Walter Sherman. Apparently Bobby’s older brother Jack had been sleeping with this man’s wife. They were never caught in the act, in flagrante delicto so to speak, but one day in the midst of a bitter argument with her husband, the wife threw it in his face. Jack was still in college, said Bobby. The angry woman then went and told a few of her friends. Her husband was a laughing stock. He threatened Jack Kennedy’s life a number of times, in front of quite a few witnesses. Surely, all assumed, the man was all bluster. JFK himself knew nothing of these revelations, or the animosity and hostility they provoked, or the threats. His father shielded him. Bobby only learned of it when his brother became President. As Attorney General, he ordered a complete review of all the President’s perceived enemies. He made a list then, too, he told Abby.
“He gave me a copy of that list,” Abby told Walter. “I remember, it was dated February 1960. It must have been the first thing Bobby did when Jack took office.”
By 1963, this vengeful husband was divorced, eighty-one years old, and in the care of a nurse twenty-four hours a day. He had difficulty urinating. He could hardly remember the names of his children. It was doubtful he even knew who the President of the United States was. Abby scratched his name off. What surprised her about Bobby’s second list, the 1968 list, was another name, a name that had not appeared on the list he made in 1960. Frederick Lacey-Lord Frederick Lacey.
“Who is Frederick Lacey?” she asked JFK’s brother.
Finally, he told her.
By the spring of 1968, Bobby Kennedy was disheartened. Abby O’Malley told Walter she was worried about him. The murder of Martin Luther King Jr. affected him deeply. It seemed he was no closer to finding his brother’s killer than he was five years before. He viewed the list of private individuals he gave to Abby as a desperate move, an indication all hope was lost. While his run for the Democratic nomination did raise Kennedy’s enthusiasm noticeably, Abby could see the despair roiling his gut.
It was on a campaign bus in Indiana, rolling through the foothills in the southern part of the state, with a steady rain more dripping than falling, that Abby first told him it was Frederick Lacey who killed President Kennedy. “He looked at me in disbelief,” she told Walter. “I gave it to him-the whole thing, as I saw it, from start to finish-and he never said a word.” As Abby detailed a sequence of events leading to the assassination, Walter marveled at her concentration, her focus, her ability to relate apparently unrelated facts. Of course, he knew just how accurate her analysis was. He knew what Lacey had written. Abby did not. She knew nothing more than that Lacey had left something in writing, an admission, a confession.
Once she presented her conclusion to Bobby Kennedy, she asked him how he could have left Lacey’s name off the original list of the President’s enemies, the list he prepared immediately following the inauguration. His explanation was weak and tentative. It was almost as if he was making it up as he spoke. That was not like him, Abby said. Without Walter asking, she revealed that the real reason for Bobby’s oversight in 1960 was embarrassment. Robert Kennedy did not want his dead brother’s affair with Audrey Lacey coming to light then, just as he entered the White House, or later, after his death in 1963. In 1968, Abby could see his continuing determination that it never would. Bobby did not see the connections between Lacey’s masterminding of the murder and the evidence trails that, over five years, led them into the FBI and the CIA and others. Abby explained it by showing him that Lacey had contacts within all the suspect groups, all the different organizations. Sure the CIA was involved. And the FBI. Lacey was able to get information from each vital to the success of his plan. His reach extended even into the supposedly unreachable Secret Service. The strings she had been pulling, for five years, had been attached only to the coverup. The assassination itself remained a mystery. Like the mob, which was only hired for Ruby’s cleanup work on Oswald, the intelligence agencies also did not know what Lacey intended to do before he did it. Once the act had been accomplished, it was too late for all of them. In their rush to cover up their unwitting roles, they made many mistakes. There were dozens of sleuths chasing down the facts: newspaper reporters, magazine journalists and freelance writers, Kennedy conspiracy enthusiasts-nuts, if you will-of all sorts. Plus, everyone at CIA and FBI knew Bobby had a crack team working around the clock. Abby’s problem was simple, her delay perfectly understandable. She never heard of Frederick Lacey until
1968.
Robert Kennedy told his mother. Later, Abby was called to her side. Rose Kennedy took great comfort in her religion, and those people, from humble priest to lofty Cardinal, who were significant in it did all they could for her. Had she not forbidden him, Bobby would have flown to England that very day and killed Lacey with his bare hands. His mother insisted he put all thought of that out of his mind. Instead, she called Lacey herself. Abby was with her
