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Re-Open RFK Assassination
New Twist in Kennedy Mystery;
Re-Open RFK Assassination by Michael Carmichael Global Research, November 22, 2006
Planning to write a film script about the case, Shane O’Sullivan, an independent researcher, investigated the assassination of RFK. But, O’Sullivan found much more than he had hoped. On Monday night, the BBC broadcast O’Sullivan’s report on their high-profile programme, Newsnight. O’Sullivan’s findings shocked many people. Working through an exhaustive analysis of videotapes made at the Ambassador Hotel on the night of RFK’s assassination, O’Sullivan identified three figures as former agents of the CIA. Two of the agents O’Sullivan identified could be seen moving away from the hotel pantry shortly after the shooting of RFK. Following his preliminary identifications, O’Sullivan presented the video images to more authoritative sources, men who knew the three agents personally. While there was a slender degree of uncertainty (circa 5-10%) the men in the videos were positively identified as the former CIA agents: David Sanchez Morales; Gordon Campbell and George Joannides. Morales was known to be involved in coups d’etats throughout Latin America and he had a reputation of a dangerous man with an explosive temper who was capable of violence. To entertain his friends, Morales would tell stories about his involvement in the killing and capture of Che Guevara, coups in Latin America and other nefarious covert activities. Two of the CIA agents in the Ambassador Hotel: Morales and Joannides are now dead, while the whereabouts of the third, Campbell, are presently unknown. O’Sullivan interviewed Bradley Ayers, US Army Captain retired, who had been stationed at JM-Wave, the Miami base for the CIA. In 1963, David Morales was the Chief of Operations at JM-Wave. Ayers and Morales trained Cuban exiles in the arts of sabotage to be deployed in covert action against the regime of Fidel Castro. On camera, Ayers identified Morales and Campbell with what he described as 95% accuracy. Following that positive identification, Ayers introduced O’Sullivan to David Rabern, a freelance mercenary who had been contracted by the CIA to participate in the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Rabern had been in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel on the fateful night in 1968.
While Rabern did not know Morales and Campbell by name, he had noticed them talking to each other in the hotel lobby prior to the assassination. Earlier in the same year, Rabern had noticed Campbell in and around several police stations. If true, this report is rather odd considering that the CIA has no jurisdiction on US soil. Another bizarre fact: Morales was officially stationed in Laos in 1968. O’Sullivan found video images of Campbell with another figure who has now been identified as George Joannides, a pivotal figure in the CIA and the re-investigation of the assassination of JFK. Joannides had been the Chief of Psychological Warfare Operations at JM-Wave. He had retired from his CIA post, but in 1978 he returned to active duty, as it were, as the liaison between the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) during its re-investigation of the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King. Puzzling, perplexing and problematic, Joannides failed to inform his colleagues at the HSCA that he had ever worked at JM-Wave. This is a troubling enigma for it suggests that he intended to maintain his covert identity – a fact that would compromise his involvement in the HSCA and jeopardize the entire congressional investigation. A former researcher with the HSCA, Ed Lopez, identified Joannides as the person in the Ambassador Hotel video with what he described on camera as 99% accuracy. More. Lopez recalled Joannides obstructive practice of denying the HSCA access to crucial documents in the re-investigation of the assassination of JFK. O’Sullivan did not stop there. Moving to Washington, he met Wayne Smith a veteran State Department official who worked with Morales at the US embassy in Havana in the final year of the Batista regime through the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and 1960. When O’Sullivan asked him to respond the Ambassador Hotel video, Smith immediately stated, “That’s him, that’s Morales.” From a conversation in 1975, Smith recalled that Morales stated that JFK deserved to be assassinated. From Smith’s testimony, O’Sullivan learned that Morales “hated the Kennedys” – because of their cancelling the air support for the failed Bay of Pigs invastion of 1961. In a hotel near the CIA headquarters (now named the George H. W. Bush Center for Central Intelligence) in Langley, Virginia, O’Sullivan met with a former agent, Tom Clines who said that all of the men in the Ambassador Hotel videos had been misidentified as former CIA agents. When O’Sullivan informed him that Ayers and Smith had positively identified the men as Morales, Campbell and Joannides, Clines became “disturbed,” and he refused to go on camera for the interview. Following his interview of Clines, senior journalists in Washington advised O’Sullivan to take his testimony with a grain of salt as he was known to “blow smoke” deliberately as a routine function to dissemble facts for the press and public. Gaeton Fonzi was the lead investigator of the HSCA investigation of the assassination of JFK. In his book, The Last Investigation, Fonzi reported the testimony of Bob Walton, a man who met Morales and discussed JFK with him. According to Fonzi’s account, Morales asserted his direct involvement in the assassination of JFK as revenge for the Bay of Pigs.
On the Watergate tapes, Richard Nixon always referred to the assassination of JFK as, “the Bay of Pigs thing.” During Eisenhower’s presidency, Nixon served as the White House liason with the CIA. As Vice-President Nixon worked directly with Allen Dulles and other senior staff at the CIA on the planning of the Bay of Pigs operation. It should be noted that George H. W. Bush has been known to have been integral to the Bay of Pigs operation since the publication of the enormously popular bestselling book of 1991, Plausible Denial, by Mark Lane.
During his campaign for the presidency in 1960, Nixon was shocked that JFK made public the contents of his top-secret intelligence briefings – and had moved to Nixon’s right to advocate overt military intervention against Cuba. The CIA planned to overthrow Castro in an invasion manned with exiled Cubans trained by the staff at JM-Wave. From our perspective today, it is perfectly understandable why JFK would have been compelled to make this policy position public in his presidential campaign. Had he not done so, JFK could have been tarnished with a charge of being, “weak on communism,” by Nixon who had been one of the leading witch-hunters of the disgraceful McCarthy Era. Upon his inauguration as president, JFK continued to support the plans to attack Cuba with the force of exiled Cubans – a project that Nixon had nurtured, supported and managed for the Eisenhower White House. However, JFK decided to withhold US air support in order to maintain an arm’s length separation from the Cuban invasion. The Bay of Pigs became a fiasco. JFK accepted the blame, and he immediately ordered a thorough-going reorganization of the CIA. A few months later, Allen Dulles, who had been a free-wheeling manufacturer of coups d’etats while serving as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), ‘retired’ after a formal conversation with JFK. JFK promptly named a new director, and John McCone who had been the director of the Atomic Energy Commission soon took Dulles’s place as DCI. JFK’s reorientation of the CIA did not stop there. Recognizing that the agency’s mission to wage a covert Cold War was dangerously counterproductive, JFK ordered the CIA to make nuclear non-proliferation its top priority. Eventually, JFK would successfully negotiate the Test Ban Treaty with Nikita Khruschev in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis - by far the most significant strategic confrontation of the entire Cold War. While rogue elements in the US intelligence community have long been suspected of meddling in his assassination and those of his brother and Martin Luther King, Shane O’Sullivan’s identification of three CIA agents in the Ambassador Hotel on the night of the assassination of RFK suggests strongly that the case should be reopened. The third agent in the Ambassador Hotel, George Joannides, now appears to have been engaged in a sabotage mission during the HSCA investigation of JFK’s assassination. The assassination of JFK would seem to be an eternal mystery that has long since passed into the realm of myth, however that is not the case for today, technology has provided a wealth of new tools with which to examine evidence in criminal cases – even cold cases over forty years old. While O’Sullivan is calling for a re-opening of the case of RFK, it is only reasonable to re-open JFK’s case, as well. In 1968, I was in my final year at the University of North Carolina. From my meeting with a close associate of RFK, I worked as a college and university organizer in his presidential campaign. At the time of his assassination, RFK was the leading candidate for the presidency – far ahead of his nearest rival in the polls and definitely on track to win the November election.
Seeing the BBC broadcast of video tape evidence of three unassigned CIA agents in the Ambassador Hotel Ballroom at the time of RFK’s assassination shocked me. The federal government, Congress and the criminal justice system of the United States failed to protect the president of the United States and its leading presidential candidates. Worse. They have failed to tell the truth to the American people. Today, on the anniversary of one of the most tragic dates in American history – I propose that he cases of RFK and JFK should be re-opened in either the 110th or the 111th Congress. We must follow the evidence exhaustively and relentless, leaving no stone unturned and no document unexamined regardless of its current status: Sensitive; Secret, Top Secret or Above Top Secret. To do any less would be to become complicit in the lies and cover-ups that have denied the American people of the truth.
References
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From J Bruce Campbell 11-26-6 Jeff - Regarding Michael Carmichael's Global Research piece: 'Re-Open The RFK Assassination' investigation on Rense.com http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=viewArticle&code=CAR20061122&articleId=3947 Carmichael refers to "the disgraceful McCarthy era," or words to that effect. What was disgraceful about it was McCarthy's dear friend, Jack Kennedy, betraying him when he could have supported him in the Senate vote to censure or condemn him. JFK stayed in the hospital and abstained. Joe McCarthy almost married Eunice Kennedy before he came to his senses. Joe got Jack elected Senator in '52 by not campaigning for Henry Cabot Lodge at the height of McCarthy's power and popularity. Bobby was on Joe McCarthy's staff, so how "disgraceful" was it? Bobby just couldn't get along with Roy Cohn. Did McCarthy ever accuse a person who was not, in fact, mobbed up with the Communist Party or the Soviet Union? Where's the "disgrace" on McCarthy's part, other than hiring Roy Cohn? Without Joe McCarthy helping Jack Kennedy, the latter would never have become a senator, let alone the president. With all the sanctimonious tributes to the Kennedys, let's not forget they murdered Marilyn Monroe. Don't forget that they partnered up with the mob because of old Joe Kennedy's mob ties. Bobby and Jack double-crossed the mob after taking their help in the Chicago vote rigging. Daddy taught them how to use women and throw them away. Crazy sex parties in the White House. Jack in bed, smoking dope with Judith Campbell Exner, Sam Giancana's girlfriend, in the middle of the "missile crisis." It's funny that the writer/researcher would go to Tom Clines for verification of anything. He is the biggest crook in the CIA - ask Ed Wilson. Clines, Shackley, Von Marbod, Armitage - the heroin cartel. They sent Wilson to prison after getting him to bankroll their EATSCO scam. Clines' girlfriend told the whole story in the old Spotlight newspaper in Washington DC. I went to Marion Penitentiary twice to interview Wilson for the paper. Years later, he was released because he was telling the truth about being framed by those lousy crooks. The Kennedys played everyone for suckers. JFK did some good things such as go against the Federal Reserve and Israel. Maybe he would have shut down Eisenhower's Vietnam adventure. But their house was built on betrayal of everyone who helped them. They were Big Time liberals who wiretapped ML King and associates; super-rich Democrats who built their power base on the very poor. No different from the GOP-rats today. The only guy with guts and honor and loyalty in Washington in the 1950s was Joe McCarthy. Fifty years later we find that his only error, besides hiring Roy Cohn, was that there were lots more Red rats in power than he thought. Ever hear of Harry Hopkins? Check out the Venona papers. And look up Major Jordan's Diaries on the net (and listen to hour three, Rense program Archives, 8-8-6). I find that people who criticize McCarthy are either gutless or ignorant - or in sympathy with the subversives who had seized control of our foreign policy and took us to war on the side of the Soviet, Chinese and Vietnamese Communists, and then to non-winable but lucrative wars in Asia against our handy new enemies - our erstwhile allies. The most famous of these was George C. Marshall. McCarthy wrote a book about him. Still, it's good to show that RFK and JFK were gunned down by the CIA, although it would be wise to include the Mossad in both hits. The Palestinian busboy thing is the tipoff. By the way, how could a nobody Palestinian busboy know that Bobby would be coming through the kitchen and just happen to have a loaded revolver on him? And be in the right place to start blazing away, even if he never actually HIT RFK? Did the police just think that a busboy would normally be carrying a loaded revolver while clearing tables? How could Sirhan know where to stand and wait? Where'd he get the gun? Who decided to take Bobby through the kitchen? Who hired the rent-a-cop Thane E. Cesar as a "bodyguard" who followed along just behind Bobby? Why don't you guys ask some pertinent questions? JB Campbell Reproduced from www.Rense.com
Guides To The JFK/RFK Kill Zones 11-26-6 The rhetorical questions I asked in the response to Carmichael's RFK piece got me to thinking. I studied reports of that night in the Ambassador Hotel, which I'd seen live on television, thinking at the time that Bobby was probably going to get it anytime. When it actually happened a few minutes later, it was of course disconcerting. Personally, I didn't like the Kennedys. But this was natural, I guess, for a cowboy who would have nothing in common with a bunch of Boston dudes. So I'm not going to get maudlin about our nouveau-royalty that was foisted on us in 1960. The problem was, the super-rats who had them killed were a hundred times worse. It is obvious that the Kennedy brothers were betrayed by their guards. Jack was driven into his kill zone by a guy named Bill Greer. The astonishing thing about the Dealey Plaza hit was that Greer drove down the Elm Street hill and came almost to a dead stop seconds after the shooting started. Secret Service procedure is to gas it at the first hint of a discouraging word or a loud noise. Greer came to a virtual halt, so as to give the shooters a nice easy target. It probably never occurred to him that an old geezer with a Bell & Howell 8mm would be cranking away right next to him. He came to a stop and looked back at Kennedy until the massive head shot was made. Clint Hill was riding on the car behind and he was able to hop off that one, run forward and jump on the rear step of the Lincoln death car, just in time to keep Jackie from scrambling the hell away from where all the bullets were converging. She was going to bail but Hill got her back next to the corpse. Greer's work was done and then he gassed it, as if he remembered to follow procedure all of a sudden. It's pretty obvious, when you watch it a few times. Pay no attention to the nonsense about him pulling a nickel-plated .45 and shooting Kennedy. All he had to do was come to a virtual halt and let the pros nail him in the head. He turned and watched carefully until it was time to go. In 1968 I was living in Reno. I knew a guy there, an FBI agent named Doug Burau. I knew him pretty well. We were shooting buddies. Doug was involved in what the Bureau called "Security." Security had to do with counter-espionage. Maybe it still does. One time I asked him what he thought of the Lee Oswald legend? All of a sudden, he wasn't so friendly. I said, but it doesn't make any sense. He angrily cut off all discussion by insisting that Oswald was the one and the only one. So I saw right there what the FBI party line was. I never brought it up again because it was like a religious belief to him. I should have made the connection that Hoover, being involved, naturally gave orders that allowed no discussion of the assassination among his agents. Doug was a true believer in old J. Edgar, as he called him. But Doug did tell me something that just came back to me as I began to study the Bobby Kennedy killing. He said that his old friend, a former FBI agent named Bill Barry, was Bobby's head security man. He told me that Barry really didn't like Bobby. He hadn't cared for his brother, either, and Doug related the lurid reports by Barry of the wild sex parties in the JFK White House, when the brothers would bring in uninhibited women for the enjoyment of themselves and their buddies, when Jackie was not present. Doug told me these things in the four or five months after I'd met him, before the June assassination. I thought it strange that Bobby's chief bodyguard really didn't like him, however considering Hoover's hatred of all three brothers, it was more understandable. And I forgot about it for all these years, until I read something today. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks. Bobby's friend and part-time bodyguard, LA Rams lineman Roosevelt Grier, told the police that the plan had been to take Bobby and Ethel to meet the press in another ball room downstairs, I believe. And there was a set way they were going to get there. But at the last minute, Grier said, Bill Barry, the chief of security, changed the route. They'd be going through the kitchen instead, supposedly to avoid the big crowd. And Barry led the way off the podium, down some stairs to the pantry. But once they got in the narrow pantry, Grier said that Barry fell behind. Grier and Rafer Johnson were then leading the way, with the maitre'd, Karl Uecker, taking Bobby by his right wrist and leading him through the tight passageway. A rent-a-cop named Gene Cesar was behind Kennedy's right shoulder and in fact had his left hand on Bobby's right shoulder. Kennedy stopped to shake hands with a busboy and a waiter, hovered over protectively by Uecker, when Sirhan came forward with his Iver Johnson 8-shot .22 revolver. He cursed Kennedy and opened up, managing to get off two shots before Uecker let go of Kennedy and grabbed Sirhan's gun hand and began twisting and banging it on a serving table, quickly joined by the athletes and others. Sirhan kept pulling the trigger, hitting five bystanders but missing Kennedy. Simultaneously, Kennedy fell over backwards, shot in the mastoid region behind his right ear and then twice more up through his right armpit. A fourth shot went through the shoulder pad of his coat. At least twelve shots were fired in all. One man saw the whole thing and immediately reported it to the police and to his television news team. Donald Schulman, of KNXT Television in Los Angeles, reported to his anchorman, Jerry Dunphy, that he had seen the Ace Security Company's part-time rent-a-cop named Thane Eugene Cesar, pull his revolver and fire it as he fell down with Kennedy. Cesar later admitted that he had pulled his gun from its holster but he "wasn't sure" that he'd fired it. But he was exactly where you'd have to be to put those three holes in Kennedy. He also admitted some other things, such as the fact that he detested the Kennedy brothers, who'd "sold out the country." What kind of a gun was he carrying? A .38 special. Did he have a .22, like Sirhan's? Well, yes, he did, but he wasn't carrying it that night. He said he'd sold it to a guy in Arkansas the previous February. This was June. It turned out that he still had it and sold it to the guy a few months later. The cops never asked him about either gun. He said he'd rather not talk to the grand jury and the cops said, "Okay." The .22 was a 9-shot Iver Johnson, almost identical to Sirhan's. Ted Chirach finally found it in an Arkansas pond years later. Chirach's the dogged reporter who nailed Cesar as the real killer, but no one would do anything about it because Kennedy was supposed to die. There's a lot more to the Gene Cesar story, but you get the idea. All he had to do was get behind Bobby and wait for some nut with a gun to start shooting. Almost nobody would notice him in the excitement. But Don Schulman did notice and stuck to his story, even insisting that Bobby had been hit three times when the cops were saying twice. Then even his own television colleagues betrayed him, insisting that he'd never said anything about seeing Cesar draw and fire. Years later, former LAPD Chief Daryl Gates had a radio show on KFI Radio in Los Angeles. He made some crack about "assault weapons needing to be banned" so I called in and objected to a guy who was a public servant violating the Bill of Rights. He tried to laugh me off but then I accused him of sending his captains and lieutenants off to Ventura County the day the Rodney King jury was due to come back and of trying to blame some poor underling for letting the riot get out of control. That knocked him off balance because he wouldn't allow any talk about the L.A. Riot on his show. Then I said, "But you're also the guy who destroyed all the evidence from the Ambassador Hotel kitchen. You had all the ceiling panels and door frames with the bullet holes in them destroyed. You did this, Chief, because you've been an asset of the CIA for your whole career as a Los Angeles policeman, haven't you?" He was flabbergasted. The next day, he was fired from KFI. It was so easy! The main thing in all these assassinations, starting with Lincoln, is the complicity or negligence of the bodyguards combined with fake investigations and destruction of evidence by the police. It's always the same. The more important the murder, the more mundane the murderer, the more prosaic the weapon. Reproduced from www.Rense.com
CIA role claim in Kennedy killing
New video and photographic evidence that puts three senior CIA operatives at the scene of Robert Kennedy's assassination has been brought to light.
It reveals that the operatives and four unidentified associates were at the Ambassador Hotel, Los Angeles in the moments before and after the shooting on 5 June, 1968. The CIA had no domestic jurisdiction and some of the officers were based in South-East Asia at the time, with no reason to be in Los Angeles. 'Decoy' Kennedy had just won the California Democratic primary on an anti-War ticket and was set to challenge Nixon for the White House when he was shot in a kitchen pantry. A 24-year-old Palestinian, Sirhan Sirhan, was arrested as the lone assassin and notebooks at his house seemed to incriminate him. However, even under hypnosis, he has never been able to remember the shooting and defence psychiatrists concluded he was in a trance at the time. Witnesses placed Sirhan's gun several feet in front of Kennedy but the autopsy showed the fatal shot came from one inch behind. Dr Herbert Spiegel, a world authority on hypnosis at Columbia University, believes Sirhan may have been hypnotically programmed to act as a decoy for the real assassin. Evidence The report is the result of a three-year investigation by filmmaker Shane O'Sullivan. He reveals new video and photographs showing three senior CIA operatives at the hotel.
David Morales was Chief of Operations and once told friends: "I was in Dallas when we got the son of a bitch and I was in Los Angeles when we got the little bastard." Gordon Campbell was Chief of Maritime Operations and George Joannides was Chief of Psychological Warfare Operations. Joannides was called out of retirement in 1978 to act as the CIA liaison to the Congressional investigation into the JFK assassination. Now, we see him at the Ambassador Hotel the night a second Kennedy is assassinated. Memory
Paul Schrade, a key figure behind the school project, was walking behind Robert Kennedy that night and was shot in the head. He believes this new evidence merits fresh investigation: "It seems very strange to me that these guys would be at a Kennedy celebration. What were they doing there? And why were they there? It's our obligation as friends of Bob Kennedy to investigate this." Ed Lopez, a former Congressional investigator who worked with Joannides in 1978, says: "I think the key people at the CIA need to go back to anybody who might have been around back then, bring them in and interview them, and ask - is this Gordon Campbell? Is this George Joannides?" This report was shown on Newsnight on Monday, 20 November, 2006.
Reproduced from BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/6169006.stm
New Twist in Kennedy Mystery;
The negatives of some photographs taken in the moments surrounding the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy are missing. That is not a matter of debate. But almost everything else about the pictures is. Did they show the crucial seconds when bullets felled the presidential candidate in a pantry at the Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968, as claimed by the photographer, Jamie Scott Enyart? Or did they show nothing of the assassination, as alleged by the city attorney's office? Could they have been destroyed, along with other evidence, after the official assassination investigation, as suggested by Enyart? Or were they simply misplaced, only to turn up in state archives more than 25 years later, as claimed by city and state officials? And was a manila envelope containing the recently rediscovered negatives stolen from a courier's car in Inglewood last Friday, as claimed by the courier? Even attorneys for the city, who may soon have to mount a defense in Enyart's $2-million lawsuit over the missing negatives, admit that the circumstances surrounding the alleged theft are "highly unusual." Enyart's attorney, Alvin Greenwald, hinted darkly at a conspiracy--a suggestion, never substantiated, that has haunted every investigation of the New York senator's death. "Somebody, for some reason, is making sure those photos do not reach public view," Greenwald said. Louis "Skip" Miller, an attorney for the city, conceded that the incident in Inglewood was strange, but he scoffed at Greenwald's suggestion. "What happened here is just a petty theft," Miller said. "A run of bad luck." The Los Angeles City Council offered a $5,000 reward Wednesday for the negatives' safe return, saying they are "critical evidence" in the defense against Enyart's lawsuit. Enyart said Wednesday that he is in "absolute shock" over the missing negatives. "They've been playing fast and loose with the evidence since Day 1," he said, suggesting that some important material in the case had been deliberately destroyed. "All I want is my photos." Enyart, now a 43-year-old television special effects director, was a 15-year-old amateur photographer when he attended the primary election gathering at the Ambassador in 1968. By his account, he shot three rolls of film that night. He said most of those exposures were made during Kennedy's victory speech in the Ambassador's ballroom, but a few captured the critical moments when Kennedy was gunned down seconds later in a nearby pantry. (Enyart's pictures should not be confused with the widely circulated photos of the dying senator by Times staff photographer Boris Yaro and Life magazine photographer Bill Eppridge.) In the weeks that followed the slaying, investigators confiscated every photograph they could find that had been taken that night at the Ambassador. Enyart's were among them. Later, when he asked for his film, he learned that the courts had ordered that investigative files on the case--and all evidentiary material related to it--be sealed for 20 years. After waiting 20 years, Enyart asked for his photos back in 1988. The city said it had lost them. Enyart, who had begun work on a book about the assassination, responded with a $2-million lawsuit that he filed against the city and state on Aug. 14, 1989. Last August, Enyart was told that his negatives had been found in the state archives in Sacramento, where they had been filed mistakenly under the wrong name. The state hired a courier, George Phillip Gebhardt, who flew to Los Angeles International Airport on Friday with an envelope that was said to contain the negatives. Gebhardt later told Inglewood police that as he headed downtown in a rented car, he got a flat tire on Century Boulevard near Freeman Avenue. He said that when he got out to inspect the tire, he may have left the right front window partially open. The courier said that when he got back into the car, his jacket, which he had left on the front seat, and the envelope, which he had left on the back seat, were missing. Gebhardt acknowledged that he didn't see anyone near the car when he got out to check the tire. But he said that when he had stopped for a traffic light a block earlier, he had seen a man get out of a red car behind him and start pounding the fender of the red car with his fist. That man, Gebhardt suggested, might have slashed his tire. On Wednesday, during preliminary court maneuverings for the trial of the lawsuit, which is scheduled to start Feb. 5, attorneys for the city displayed contact prints they said had been made from the negatives before they were lost. None of the prints showed Kennedy after he left the ballroom. Enyart insisted that the contact prints were incomplete. He said he had taken pictures that showed Kennedy twisting and falling after he was shot in the pantry: "I watched Kennedy fall to the ground. Where are those photos?" Miller, the attorney for the city, responded with skepticism. "He's trying to say two more rolls of film are missing, but they don't exist," Miller said. "There are no pantry pictures." PHOTO: Skip Miller, an attorney for the city of Los Angeles, displays a contact sheet of Jamie Enyart's negatives at hearing. PHOTO: (B1) NEGATIVES VANISH: The disappearance of negatives of photos taken by Jamie Scott Enyart, above, in the moments around the assassination of Robert Kennedy raises questions. B10 PHOTOGRAPHER: RICK MEYER / Los Angeles Times Type of Material: Descriptors: KENNEDY, ROBERT F; ASSASSINATIONS -- LOS ANGELES; PHOTOGRAPHS; EVIDENCE; MISSING PROPERTY; LOS ANGELES -- SUITS; ENYART, JAMIE SCOTT; Copyright © 1996 Times Mirror Company Note: May not be reproduced or retransmitted without permission. To talk to our permissions department, call: (800) LATIMES, ext. 74564. Feedback? Try HELP or email archives@latimes.com -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Headline: Robert Kennedy Photos Wire Service: APn (AP US & World) Date: Son, 23. Jun 1996 Copyright 1996 The Associated Press. By MICHAEL FLEEMAN Associated Press Writer LOS ANGELES (AP) -- On assignment for his high school newspaper one June night in 1968, Scott Enyart pointed his Nikon at Robert F. Kennedy and saw history through a 50mm lens. "All of a sudden," Enyart recalls, "he dropped from the frame." What Enyart witnessed in the pantry of the Ambassador Hotel were the last frantic moments in the life of a man who might have been president. Enyart's photographs could potentially show so much, answer so many questions about a case that has been dogged by allegations of incompetent investigation and cover-up from the start. But the photos, Enyart says, are missing. In a lawsuit against the city that is scheduled for trial by midweek, Enyart alleges the pictures -- among 108 frames of film he says he exposed that night -- were either lost or sold by the Los Angeles Police Department. Enyart wants the city to give his photos back or, at the very least, fork over some of the money he says he could have made for the dramatic images. He accuses the city of putting up three decades of roadblocks to cover its actions in the Kennedy investigation. "These police officers are going to be put on the stand and describe how they conducted business 25 years ago. It's not going to be a very pretty picture," says Enyart, now 43 and a special-effects man for the movies. The city contends the pictures exist only in Enyart's teen-age imagination, that whatever photos he took at the Ambassador were returned to him as prints. The negatives, the city alleges, were lost in an unfortunate theft earlier this year. "I'll call it wishful thinking and, frankly, that's what it is," says Skip Miller, an attorney for the city. "If they were important evidence, they would have been used at the (Sirhan Sirhan) trial, as 40 other photographs were." On June 5, 1968, Enyart was taking pictures for the Fairfax High School Gazette of Kennedy's celebration after winning California's Democratic presidential primary. When Kennedy finished his speech in the hotel ballroom, Enyart followed the New York senator into a nearby kitchen pantry. He says he was snapping him in profile when Kennedy suddenly twisted out of the viewfinder and turmoil erupted. Enyart says he raised his camera over his head and pressed the shutter repeatedly. He climbed up on a steamer table and took even more photos. Minutes later, he returned to the ballroom to record the chaos there. Police confiscated Enyart's film -- he says it was three, 36-exposure rolls -- and interviewed the youngster at Rampart Division station. A transcript of that questioning still exists. But not all the pictures. Enyart received about two dozen prints from the police, all of which showed either the speech or the ballroom after the assassination. None of what he considers the important ones, those showing the scene in the pantry immediately after the shooting and the apprehension of Sirhan, were returned. Told that investigators had sealed all evidence in the case for 20 years, Enyart waited until the late 1980s, then requested return of all his photos. The images, he says, could be valuable to himself and to history. "They would at least corroborate or disprove the theories that are out there and, to me, put the whole thing to rest," he says. These theories include dark suggestions that Sirhan didn't act alone, that a second weapon was involved, that police bungled the investigation or covered up crucial facts. Sirhan was convicted and remains in prison in California. Enyart filed suit, the city said it didn't have his film, and he failed to turn up any trace of his negatives independently. Then city attorneys reported finding the negatives, misfiled under the wrong name in the state archives in Sacramento. They sent Enyart a proof sheet they said was made from the archived negatives and arranged for a courier to deliver the negatives to him. But the proof sheet contained only 29 1/2 frames. Enyart says he was eager to get the negatives and show that the proof sheet was not a complete record of his work that night. Then things took a turn for the weird. The courier claimed the package of negatives was stolen from his rental car in Inglewood. Now, all Enyart has left is a proof sheet -- and a lot of suspicions. He says he now doubts even whether the proof sheet images are his pictures. Additionally, the negatives proofed on paper were from bulk roll Ilford film, and he was using prepackaged Kodak film that night. His attorney, Alvin Greenwald, suggested the city and the police want to prevent the public from seeing these images for reasons only the police know. "All that we know (is) Scott's (case) may have shed something far more penetrating, far more important, far more significant than the mere loss of film," Greenwald said Not so, says the city's Miller, who insists the proof sheet from the archives memorializes all of Enyart's work. "He's got the pictures," said Miller. "They are in sequence. They are what they are." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Headline: RFK Photos Wire Service: APn (AP US & World) Date: Don, 22. Aug 1996 Copyright 1996 The Associated Press. LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A jury on Thursday awarded a photographer $450,600 in damages and compensation for photographs he took of the Robert F. Kennedy assassination that were lost or destroyed. A Los Angeles Superior Court jury deliberated more than two weeks before awarding Scott Enyart damages from the city for the eight years he spent trying to retrieve his film. The city contended that whatever photos Enyart took of the presidential hopeful at the Ambassador Hotel on June 5, 1968, were returned to him as prints. The city said the negatives were lost in a theft earlier this year. Enyart took the pictures when he was 15, working on a high-school photojournalism assignment. "As I was taking pictures, Robert Kennedy all of a sudden just dropped and twisted and fell," Enyart, 43, testified in the trial of his lawsuit. He alleged that the photos, among 108 frames of film he says he exposed that night, were either lost or sold by the Los Angeles Police Department after being seized that night by investigators. City lawyers say Enyart shot only one roll of film, none of it crucial. "They took my film. They took it at gunpoint, they promised that they would give it back," Enyart said outside court. "The courts asked me to wait for 20 years. By behaving as a good citizen and obeying the law, and obeying the courts, I was punished," Enyart said. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Man Wins Battle With City Over Kennedy Assassination Photos Friday, August 23, 1996 Courts: He is awarded $450,600. Pictures of murder of Robert Kennedy were confiscated by LAPD and lost. By CARLA RIVERA, Times Staff Writer A Los Angeles man was awarded $450,600 Thursday by a Superior Court jury that found the city negligent for failing to return photographs that police confiscated after the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy. The verdict was a vindication for Jamie Scott Enyart, 43, a Hollywood special effects artist, who called his eight-year struggle for compensation a classic match of "David versus Goliath." "I am absolutely thrilled," said Enyart, who was 15 and on assignment for his Fairfax High School newspaper June 5, 1968, when Kennedy, seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, was shot to death in the Ambassador Hotel pantry by Sirhan B. Sirhan. In a case laced with historical and haunting memories, Enyart had claimed for years that as a teenager he stood atop a table and captured the moment when Kennedy was shot. Enyart said he took three rolls of film, capturing scenes of the senator falling and the pandemonium that followed, but that the film was taken by police. He sued for $2 million, alleging that the city either lost or destroyed his valuable historical documents and then tried to cover up its deeds. City lawyers had accused Enyart of trying to make money off the tragedy. They maintained that Enyart had been at the Ambassador but had taken only one roll of film and could not have captured the pivotal seconds of the assassination because he was not in the pantry where Kennedy was shot. "They took my film and they took it at gunpoint," Enyart said after the verdict. "They promised that they would give it back and . . . asked me to wait for 20 years. I behaved as a good citizen and obeyed the law and . . I was punished." The verdict was yet another blow to the credibility of the Los Angeles Police Department, as a jury accepted accusations that its handling of Enyart, his photographs and the entire case was, at the very least, incompetent. "We definitely thought the city and police screwed up all the way through," said jury foreman Dorsey Caldwell. The panel, which found the city and one of its police officers liable for negligence, awarded Enyart $299,700 in damages, $100,800 for the eight years he spent pursuing his film and $50,100 for the alleged destruction of his negatives. Louis "Skip" Miller, a private attorney hired by the city at $225 an hour to handle the case, was tight-lipped after the decision, saying only that lawyers will decide later whether to appeal. Miller had moved for a mistrial before the verdict was read, alleging juror misconduct and coercion. Superior Court Commissioner Emilie H. Elias, who presided over the trial, denied the motion. But Miller indicated that those allegations--made by an excused juror who had been the panel's foreman--would be pursued. On Monday, Elias said Miller may have acted inappropriately by talking to the excused juror and said she would report his actions to the State Bar. Enyart says his photos would have answered key questions about the assassination: from which direction the shots were fired and whether there was more than one gunman. In the weeks following the slaying, investigators confiscated all known photos and film they could find from that night, including Enyart's. He later learned that the case files would be sealed for 20 years. In 1988, when Enyart had begun a book on the assassination and requested the photos, the city said it had lost them. ©Los Angeles Times - Thursday, January 18, 1996
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O'Sullivan's
report 
What were they
doing there? It's our obligation as friends of Bob Kennedy to
investigate this
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