(This piece appears in the current edition of The Barnes Review along with the M. L. King article found here in the April Musings. Both assassinations were “inside” jobs, and both cases resulted in innocent men being sentenced to life in prison.)

Who Killed Senator Robert F. Kennedy? 

Fifty years ago, one of the most shocking assassinations in U.S. history took place. Was the wrong man convicted?

Who killed RFK? While the conviction of the patsy Sirhan Sirhan was inevitable, evidence showed shots from the rear and prosecutorial misconduct. In addition, the “defense” attorney for the hapless Sirhan sold him down the river. Did a “crowd control” guard named Thane Cesar fire the fatal bullets while witnesses were distracted?

 By Pat Shannan

The assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy (D-N.Y.), who surely would have been elected president in November of 1968, carried with it even more mysterious circumstances, including a “fixed” trial, than the 1963 murder of his brother, President John F. Kennedy.

The documented evidence in the first Kennedy murder was buried for 75 years, although much has surfaced through private investigation during the past 54. But the biggest secrets of the RFK murder lie locked in the hypnotically shutdown mind of the convicted Sirhan Bishara Sirhan. He was another victim of the CIA’s mind control program known as MK-Ultra.

After the trial had commenced, Sirhan was coerced by his lawyers into pleading guilty, just as James Earl Ray had been a few months earlier in Memphis, but the judge would not allow it and made the trial go on. Then Sirhan was betrayed by the lead member of his legal team, an overpaid Hollywood divorce lawyer by the name of Grant Cooper, who had managed to become the court-appointed attorney for Sirhan, the reasons for which became obvious later.

One of Cooper’s earlier clients had been caught in an elaborate card-cheating scheme at the Beverly Hills Friars Club and was facing jail time. Suddenly, Cooper found himself in the same predicament and under federal indictment for illegally possessing grand jury notes of proceedings in an attempt to free his client, who was none other than the infamous mob crime figure Johnny Roselli, an often-named participant shooter of JFK in 1963. Roselli got four years, but after the railroading of Sirhan, Cooper was conveniently let off with a thousand-dollar fine.

Over the past decade, prior to that fateful night at the Ambassador Hotel’s California Primary celebration of June 4, Bobby Kennedy had made many enemies. He had alienated white Dixie and J. Edgar Hoover with his energetic support of desegregation of the Southern schools. He had failed in his attempts to legally deport New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello in 1961, so he had him kidnapped and flown away to Guatemala and left with only the clothes on his back. Upon his return, Marcello vowed revenge. Kennedy had angered the military-industrial complex by voicing his proposal of withdrawal from Vietnam, which had been a strong motive for JFK’s assassination. Rumor had it that southern California’s ranchers had put out a $500,000 contract on RFK for supporting the rights of migrant workers. After finding out that CIA officer William Harvey had sent illegal commando teams to Cuba to assassinate Fidel Castro, Kennedy had him banished to the Rome, Italy office. So the potential motives to kill the senator seemed to be endless, but on a personal level, nobody ever came closer to finishing off Bobby Kennedy than labor leader Jimmy Hoffa, whom Kennedy had been harassing for years and, by 1968, had finally sent to jail.

For a decade before he was a senator, both Kennedys had been at war with the Mafia and the Teamsters, to mention only a couple of their numerous fronts. And not only did Bobby Kennedy make more political enemies in a much shorter career than did his brother Jack, he had an arrogant, abrasive way about him that provoked much more personal dislike. While the president’s personality was warm and magnetic, Bobby’s public image was far more likable than his private one.

Longtime Florida mob lawyer Frank Ragano brought the point home to this writer during a luncheon interview in Tampa two years before he died. As an attorney for Santos Trafficante, Carlos Marcello, and Sam Giancana at various times, Ragano was the natural choice for Hoffa to hire in the early 1960s to aid with the problems he was having with then-Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. Hoffa harbored an enmity for Kennedy that was expanding by the hour. One morning in the attorney general’s Washington office in 1962, it was inflating by the millisecond.

Hoffa and Ragano had a 10 o’clock appointment with Kennedy to discuss a plea bargain. Kennedy was late. At 10:15, the secretary told them that she didn’t know where her boss was but was sure he would arrive shortly. At 10:30, as the two men sat cooling their heels, Ragano noticed Hoffa becoming more and more agitated as the big clock on the wall ticked away their morning. They had another appointment soon and had hoped to dispose of this one in short measure. Finally, at almost 11, Kennedy walked in with his chihuahua on a leash, removed his overcoat and began to hang it on the clothes tree in the corner by the entrance.

“I’m sorry I am late, gentlemen,” he said, “but I was walking my dog.”

Hoffa went ballistic and sprang to his feet. “You !@#$%, selfish, arrogant %$#@!” he screamed and went for the throat. “You keep me waiting for an hour while you walk your !@#$% dog?” He choked Kennedy down to the floor as his lawyer and the secretary watched in horror. She yelled for help, and Ragano, after regaining his composure and realizing he was about to witness a murder, jumped into the pile in a futile attempt to pull the stout and burly union leader off of the greatly overmatched highest-ranking legal officer in the nation.

“I am convinced that Jimmy would have strangled him to death right there in his office if one of the assistant AGs had not run out to help me pull him off,” Ragano said. “He went absolutely berserk, and I could not stop him alone. Hoffa was strong. Bobby had about 30 seconds to live. Imagine those newspaper headlines!”

Needless to say that Ragano did not pursue Hoffa’s plea bargain delusions any further, but perhaps the point about Kennedy’s aloof personality is made. Even his brother’s widow Jackie, with whom Bobby had a brief affair in 1966, was quoted as saying about his ego: “I sometimes wish that Bobby, because he is so wonderful, had been an ameba, and then he could have mated with himself.”

The Ambassador Kitchen

The final tallies from the crucial California presidential primary were in, and the celebration was on. The best-known brand name in American politics was a latecomer to the presidential campaign but one who had already emerged as the frontrunner. At just after midnight, Sen. Robert Kennedy had completed a short victory speech with “… and now it’s on to Chicago [scene of the August Democratic Convention], and let’s win there!”

These were the days before presidential candidates had Secret Service protection, and when Kennedy started toward the front door and a press conference in the Colonial Room, his Press Secretary Frank Mankiewicz turned him around and sent him through the kitchen pantry, apparently because it was a more direct and less hampered route. Was Mankiewicz (on RFK’s left above) in on the plot? No one would ever know. Although the turnaround was caught on film, his suspicious action would be one of the many to go unnoticed by the news media and uninvestigated by law enforcement, once the “lone nut” was captured and sufficiently vilified by the press.

As the senator was busily shaking hands and walking in the kitchen’s passageway, a pint-sized, uniformed kitchen worker was pushing a steel food cart on wheels toward him. When they were close enough, he screamed, “Kennedy, you sonuvabitch,” and fired six of the eight shots from his Iver Johnson .22 revolver. However, a later ballistics investigation showed that none had hit Kennedy but had gone wildly into bystanders, the walls and ceiling, undoubtedly because Sirhan was quickly grabbed and subdued by world-class athletes Rafer Johnson and Roosevelt Greer the moment he raised the weapon to begin firing. Yet Kennedy was wounded three times, all from the back side. He lay unconscious for 26 hours before succumbing, and the second Kennedy in less than five years was dead by assassination.

All five of the wounded survived. For a day and a half, Sirhan refused to identify himself, but his name was finally learned when his brother came forward after seeing his picture on television.

He serves a life sentence today and has never been able to remember what happened on the night of June 4, 1968. This is fact. It is not the likely story of one attempting to disclaim any involvement by saying, “I cannot remember.” It is the most unlikely one. Sirhan said to his psychiatric examiners, “This is not like me. I know I did it, but I don’t know why. Can you help me understand? Why did I do it?”

A decade would slowly pass before Sirhan would begin to realize that he had not killed Bobby Kennedy. The official explanation was and is that Sirhan acted alone. Another “lone nut.” It was always expected to be accepted as truth but never quite made it because of too many bullets having been fired.

Case Unofficially Reopened

In April of 1969, confident that there would be no legal appeals to worry about, LAPD slam-dunked 2,400 evidentiary photographs into the incinerator and labeled the case “solved and closed.” But former Special Agent (FBI) William Bailey was calling it “the biggest blunder in the history of criminal investigations.”

Retired Agent Bailey’s assertion became clear when a total of 11 (some claimed 13, but two were questionable) bullet holes were found to be in the walls and people. It was obvious to the most obstinate conspiracy debunker that at least one more gun in addition to Sirhan’s eight-shot revolver (with two shells remaining unfired) had to have been used in the melee. It was becoming apparent that the investigation had not been bungled at all but rather “fixed” by the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD).

When Rep. Allard Lowenstein (D-N.Y.) went public with this information in 1970, in attempt to get the case reexamined, he was shot to death in his New York City law office by another “lone nut” who was described in the news as “a disgruntled client.”

Following his autopsy of Ken­nedy, it also became obvious to Dr. Thomas Noguchi, the Los Angeles County coroner and world-renowned pathologist, that Sirhan had not killed RFK. The death shot was a .22 bullet behind the ear—a wound that included powder burns from a shot fired from “one to three inches away.” No witness could place Sirhan closer than “three to four feet” from Kennedy at any time. Even if Kennedy had turned his head, as some had falsely claimed, the Sirhan gun was never close enough to produce powder burns.

Then who killed Robert Kennedy? The question was never asked because it had always been assumed Sirhan had done it. The only question at the time was “Why?” and not even Sirhan could supply the answer to that.

Most Likely Suspect

Prof. Philip Melanson, author of The Robert F. Kennedy Assassination (1991), has offered a comprehensive study of the organized murder. In it he also performs an intensive examination of both the suppressed evidence implicating and the information exonerating the security guard who had been walking next to Kennedy at the moment of attack. Gene Cesar seems to have altered his story at some place every time he was interviewed. He also requested not to be called to the witness stand at Sirhan’s trial, and the prosecutors mysteriously honored that request.

Early in 1968, Thane Eugene Cesar, 26, had applied for the position of security guard at Ace Guard Service, supposedly because he was desperate to earn extra money and the $3 an hour ($35+ an hour in today’s value) was enticing. In recent months he had worked part-time on occasion. But it was not until late in the afternoon of June 4 that Gene received a call from Ace Guard to report to the Ambassador Hotel for duty. He says that he was called late because another guard was not able to show up at the last minute and that he was not there as a Kennedy bodyguard but for “crowd control.” At 11:15 p.m. he was assigned to check credentials at the doorway of the Colonial Room (where the press conference was to be held) and was to clear the way for the Kennedy entourage en route. As the crowd entered through the kitchen pantry swinging doors, he took up his duty and followed closely behind and to the right of Sen. Kennedy.

Seconds later when the shooting broke out, Cesar hit the floor and later admitted drawing his weapon. Although two witnesses, one a newsman, said they saw the security guard fire, Cesar says that he did not do so. He successfully passed a polygraph test organized by investigative author Dan Moldea in 1994. An LAPD polygraph was set up for him in 1968 but was canceled for unknown reasons by authorities the day before it was to take place.

However, as Moldea also points out, Cesar was standing directly behind Kennedy when Sirhan began firing and, according to his own statements, was in a position to shoot Kennedy at a point-blank range.

A total of five witnesses saw him draw the gun, and Cesar gave contradictory statements to police about exactly when he drew the weapon. (He also had been on guard duty in the pantry an hour earlier when Sirhan reportedly slipped into the area.)

The trajectory of the shots from the back, which went through Ken­nedy’s coat as well as into his head, was perfectly aligned with where Cesar said he was on the floor. If he did not fire, then he should have been right next to and able to identify the real shooter. He was never asked and never volunteered that information during Moldea’s private polygraph.

Cesar admitted owning a .22 caliber handgun but insisted that he did not carry it that night—even as a backup weapon—and that he had sold it in February. However, the sales slip showed he had not actually sold it until three months after the murder. It was never tested by LAPD for ballistics, and it subsequently disappeared. The buyer later reported it as stolen.

Cesar somehow lost his clip-on necktie during the confusion. In the famous photo of a dying RFK sprawled on the pantry floor, a stray clip-on tie lies just a foot from Kennedy’s clenched right hand. Had he momentarily grappled with Cesar when he saw the drawn gun being aimed at him? Could Cesar have then crouched down behind and to the right of Kennedy and pumped several shots into his back at point-blank range while Sirhan’s wild firing into the crowd was drawing the attention of the witnesses?

The evidence suggests but does not prove that the only armed man seen by witnesses close enough to Kennedy to fire and provoke powder burns was Cesar. Did he quickly shoot the senator point blank behind the ear while they both were still standing, then fall to the floor and fire three more times?

Kennedy was hit four times with shots that were impossible for Sirhan to have fired. Two entered his head (back and right side), one in his right armpit, the fourth went harmlessly upward through the tufted shoulder of his suit coat from right to left, also leaving powder burns, and (the last two) lodging in the ceiling, indicating that they were fired from below. All seem to implicate Cesar or, at the very least, someone that those observing Cesar’s actions should also have seen but did not.

Convincing Evidence

Because the (autopsy) evidence also shows that Sirhan could not have been in back of Kennedy or close enough (one to three inches) to shoot him and create powder burns behind the ear, someone else actually murdered the senator.

Sirhan was an unwitting participant in the RFK murder, as were Harvey Oswald, James Earl Ray, and Tim McVeigh in some of the other infamous government black ops of the 20th century.

In 1973, investigative journalist Ted Charach produced the best evidence of the cover-up in Los Angeles with what is now a long-forgotten documentary film. Charach interviewed William W. Harper, a 68-year-old Pasadena-based criminalist and firearms expert, whose testimony in hundreds of cases had been relied upon by both prosecutors and defense attorneys over the previous four decades. In late 1970, Sirhan’s appellate attorneys enlisted Harper’s aid to examine the bullets, trajectories and other physical evidence entered at trial. Had Harper been called to examine and testify at the 1969 trial, his findings would have blown the case wide open, which is the obvious reason he was not called.

His astounding evidence showed, with blow-ups of the microscopic ballistic printouts, that the bullets removed from Kennedy’s body were not fired from the same gun that wounded the other five victims. Harper said without reservation that there was no way (because of the rear trajectory) that Sirhan could have inflicted any of the shots that hit Kennedy anyway. He left no doubt that two guns had been fired with near-simultaneous timing in the room that night.

Charach also proves in an interview with the district attorney that a second .22 pistol was fired in the room that night and that it was even introduced into evidence at trial by the prosecution, no less. Talk about a blunder! LAPD criminologist DeWayne Wolfer testified under oath that he had personally test-fired the weapon—an Iver Johnson .22 revolver with the serial number H-18602—and had found it to be the weapon that had fired the bullets that had been removed from Kennedy’s neck and several other victims.

However, the serial number on Sirhan’s Iver Johnson weapon was H-53725, and not one member of the defense team appeared to catch it. In a complaint to the attorney general later, Wolfer was accused of “… suffering from a great inferiority complex for which he compensates by giving the police exactly what they need for a conviction. He casts objectivity to the winds and violates every basic tenet of forensic science and proof by becoming a crusading advocate. This is rationalized as being entirely legitimate since the accused is guilty anyway.”

When confronted with the discrepancy, District Attorney Joseph P. Busch Jr. went behind closed doors for five months (after saying that he would look at the problem and have an answer in two weeks) before emerging at a press conference to say that Wolfer had made a clerical error. He had mistakenly officially listed (twice) the tested bullets as being fired from the wrong weapon, Busch claimed.

Further, when the serial number on the second weapon was checked at the Criminal Division of Investigation and Identification in Sacramento, the records showed that it had “been destroyed by LAPD in July of 1968” (prior to the trial). Later that date was changed in the Sacramento records to show “July of 1969,” again because of a “clerical error.”

According to LAPD’s property card, the Iver Johnson pistol H-18602 had been originally booked as evidence for an earlier robbery case on March 18, 1967, more than a year before the murder of Robert Kennedy, and it had already been test-fired four days later by LAPD in connection with that prior investigation.

Busch, fast-talking and deceptive, claimed that LAPD personnel had purposely gone to their gun bin and chosen a similar weapon to use in tests at the Ambassador because it would have taken a court order to obtain the Sirhan gun. “So what? In such a high-profile investigation, what’s so hard about that?” said reporters privately.

Dr. Thomas Noguchi said that the bullet fragments removed from Kennedy’s head were too mutilated to test or to even determine the precise caliber. Yes, it could have been a .38, but none of the other guns in the room that night had been tested to see if they had been fired, including the .38 service revolver that Cesar admitted drawing.

Throughout his closing argument in Sirhan’s trial, purported defense attorney Grant Cooper never lost an opportunity to praise the prosecution’s case and the prosecutors themselves. He, continually, strangely, elevated them, and the prosecution’s case, in the jury’s eyes. Then imagine for a moment, if you can, that this is not the prosecutor speaking but what “defense” attorney Cooper included in his closing remarks to the jury:

Now, let me state at the outset that I want this to sink in if anything sinks in—we are not here to free a guilty man. We tell you as we always have, that he is guilty of having killed Sen. Kennedy. … We expect that under the evidence in this case, whether Mr. Sirhan likes it or not, under the facts of this case, he deserves to spend the rest of his life in the penitentiary. … Don’t we know from dozens and dozens of witnesses that this defendant pulled the trigger that killed Sen. Kennedy? … There is no question about that. … I wouldn’t want Sirhan Sirhan to be turned loose as he is dangerous, especially when the psychiatrists tell us that he is going to get worse and he is getting worse. There is a good Sirhan and a bad Sirhan and the bad Sirhan is nasty. … We as lawyers owe the obligation to do what we think is right to the fullest extent of our ability, but we also owe an obligation to society. And, I, for one, am not going to ask you to do otherwise than to bring in a verdict of guilty in the second degree.

No, the RFK murder investigation was not bungled at all. The “fix”— with the MK-Ultra programming of Sirhan, the bogus defense attorney, the planted gun, the burning of evidentiary pictures and the ignoring of the obvious suspects etc. — had been in from the beginning.