Latest / The Lone Gunman Podcast : JFK Assassination / Ep. 232 ~ The Strange Tale Of Robert Easterling

Transcript

Ep. 232 ~ The Strange Tale Of Robert Easterling · The Lone Gunman Podcast : JFK Assassination

• 0:16
  Everything is going to hail down here in Dector. Oh yeah, what's up
• 1:04
  everybody? This is episode number two three two of the Loaneguming Podcast. As
• 1:10
  is your boy, Big Bad Bob otherwise known as just Rob Clark, here
• 1:15
  with you for another exciting episode of the Lone Guming Podcast. The pleasure to
• 1:23
  be back with you on this beautiful screen day. A couple of things to
• 1:29
  start to show off with. I'm excited to tell you that my buddy Roger,
• 1:36
  who does the music here the Lone Guming Podcast and is responsible for our
• 1:40
  intro and our outro songs now has released another song and it is mind blowingly
• 1:53
  awesome. So make sure you stick around to the end of the show to
• 1:57
  hear the new outro. It is called Conspiracy or Shepherd on Fire and it
• 2:04
  has everything to do with the Kennedy assassination. Listen to the lyrics the music
• 2:09
  rocks. Listen to the lyrics as well to stick around to the end of
• 2:14
  the show for your Lone Gunman premiere of Conspiracy by Shepherd on Fire from my
• 2:23
  buddy Roger. That's exciting news. Also, I wanted to let everybody know
• 2:29
  that the Lone Gunman Podcast has a brand new sponsor. That's right. If
• 2:35
  you love this show and you love your boy and you want to support the
• 2:39
  show, it's real simple. If you love hot sauce like I do,
• 2:49
  then I have a treat for you, folks, because I'm bringing up board
• 2:53
  a sponsor of the show. It's called Silk City Hot Sauces, And every
• 3:00
  bottle you buy, they'll kick back a little bit to your boy, and
• 3:04
  there's something in it for you as well. Don't even send off your entire
• 3:07
  order using the code gunmen. Who Now, without further ado, I will
• 3:14
  bring you to or bring to you my new version of the Silk City Hot
• 3:21
  Sauce commercial. That took me only an hour and a half to complete this
• 3:28
  less than two minute long ad. So, without further ado, big bake,
• 3:37
  bad Vibe here with you for Silk City Hot Sauces. Why silk City
• 3:44
  Because this hot sauce comes to you directly from Patterson, New Jersey, also
• 3:47
  known as Silk City. These hot sauces are one hundred percent natural, gluten
• 3:53
  free, vegan, contain no chemicals, fillers, dyes, or Everything is
• 3:58
  packed into recyclable as containers. Because glass doesn't leach weird flavors into the product.
• 4:04
  All other hot sauces are sourced in small batches from locally bought fresh peppers.
• 4:11
  It's all about the pepper people. Hellen you, your boy, Big
• 4:15
  Bad Bob loves his food like he loves his women. Not spicy, but
• 4:20
  not so hot you can't eat them. So if you love yourself some sauce
• 4:29
  and you're tired of trying to transform your bland meat into something edible with a
• 4:38
  tip of a jar, you will transform your life forever. Whatever. To
• 4:43
  Silk City Hot Sauce dot com, place an order, and upon checkout enter
• 4:49
  the code unman as NEU N M A N for twenty percent off of your
• 4:55
  entire order. You won't regret it, thank me later, peace, And
• 5:06
  there you have it, folks. What a beautiful, beautiful dingle. Yeah,
• 5:15
  that only took an hour and a half to perfect. I could have
• 5:20
  done a whole show on outtakes and it probably would have had you all laughing
• 5:25
  hysterically. But but I did not record any of the outakes, thankfully,
• 5:31
  although I could have compiled, like I said, about an hour and a
• 5:33
  half's worth of me barely getting through anything, and me all the way getting
• 5:40
  through something and then screwing it up somehow and I thinking emphatically, but there
• 5:46
  it is. And big thank you to Jeff over it. Silk City hot
• 5:51
  sauce. Folks, I have tried it, trust me, it's good stuff.
• 5:58
  My favorite is hot sir. Okay, the slather of that shit all
• 6:02
  over my chicken burgers sneak. You can add it to chili. It's amazing
• 6:11
  and it's hot, don't get me wrong. But it's not so hot that
• 6:14
  you can't actually eat it and enjoy it. It's flavorful and it's not one
• 6:18
  of those novelty hot sauces that were you know, see how hot you can
• 6:23
  you can stand? You know, and uh, you know you and your
• 6:26
  friend do something stupid on social media. No, this is made to be
• 6:30
  eaten and enjoyed. To check it out. Um. So, on this
• 6:39
  show, we're gonna talk a little bit about something that came across from a
• 6:46
  very old book. And I believe the book is called Reasonable Doubt by Henry
• 6:54
  Hurt and something in there about this gentleman by the name of Robert Easterlin,
• 7:01
  not to be confused with Jake Esterlin of the CIA. This is somebody totally
• 7:08
  different Robert Esterlin. Now we all know, my main goal is to blow
• 7:16
  up and then I don't know nobody. No, I'm joking. My main
• 7:23
  goal is to inform you guys of just every thing that I can about the
• 7:30
  Kennedy assassination in all forms of fashion, various parts, nooks and crannies,
• 7:35
  dark corners, trusty godowee bbwebby corners, of everything, so that you have
• 7:44
  the most complete picture from which to put your puzzle together. And all of
• 7:50
  these little puzzle pieces that I feed you. I give you all these puzzle
• 7:55
  pieces. I want you to put them in a bag somewhere. Put them
• 7:59
  in a bag, and then one day I want you to dump out all
• 8:01
  those pieces and see if you can put the puzzle back together again and make
• 8:05
  it mean something, make it be cohesive. So I always like to revisit,
• 8:13
  you know, old literary stuff, and this is something that I had
• 8:18
  not actually heard or read about in a very long time. So I thought
• 8:22
  i'd bring it to your attention today. So this guy, Robert Willifred Insterling
• 8:33
  is a multiple felon, ex convict, raging alcoholic, a diagnosed psychotic and
• 8:41
  schizophrenic. He is physically powerful. He has a bellicost personality, a very
• 8:48
  violent temperament, whose family members have so feared him that on several occasions they
• 8:54
  obtain court orders to commit him to mental institutions. Been charged with the assault
• 9:01
  and convicted for burglary and bootlegging. In addition to these matters of record,
• 9:07
  Esterling is a self confessed multiple murderer. He claims to have conspired in nineteen
• 9:15
  fifty three and an insurance for aud scheme in which he and another man based
• 9:20
  a bomb and a National Airlines plane with forty six people aboard. The DC
• 9:26
  six airliner was lost in the Gulf of Mexico, and to this day there
• 9:30
  is no certain official explanation for that crash. The official reports suggested extreme weather
• 9:37
  conditions probably caused the crash. All lives were lost. One witness to the
• 9:43
  purported bombing conspiracy was an eighteen year old boy, to whom Esterling claims he
• 9:48
  made dig a grave and then executed him by shooting him through the back of
• 9:52
  the head. So yeah, real nice guy here, this Richard Esterling.
• 9:56
  Since far equally gruesome is the horrific account related by a close member of Easterling's
• 10:03
  family of a time when Easterling teased his wife and daughter by tossing flaming papers,
• 10:09
  went to a bed whether they we're reading, and threatened to butcher them
• 10:13
  with a large knife if they tried to escape. At the last moment,
• 10:18
  he relented and they survived without a serious physical injury. He wants tried to
• 10:24
  drown his wife in a hot tub or bathtub and then left her for dead.
• 10:31
  There is reliable reports that Easterling has been involved in child prostitution rings,
• 10:37
  and Easterling himself admits to additional crimes ranging from safe cracking to running an interstate
• 10:43
  car theft operation in the Deep South. He also claims to have been involved
• 10:48
  with the Communist Party in Milwaukee as an informant for the FBI. So already
• 10:54
  a great a piece of shit kind of guy. It is this man who,
• 10:58
  on September the twenty eight picked up the telephone and called Henry Hurt to
• 11:03
  describe his connection to still another crime, the assassination of John F. Kennedy.
• 11:11
  In vivid detail, Asterlin portrayed himself as a low level conspirator intimately involved
• 11:18
  in certain plans that led to President Kennedy's death in Dallas on November twenty sec
• 11:22
  nineteen sixty three. His stated motive coming forward with a confession was that he
• 11:28
  believed he was dying and he wanted to clear his conscience. He blamed the
• 11:33
  private hell he'd lived in the belief that he could have prevented the assassination for
• 11:39
  the fact that he had been committed to several mental institutions. The confession of
• 11:45
  Robert estan Ling was approached with enormous skepticism. Some of Esterling's stories about matters
• 11:50
  unrelated to the assassination rain rain from the fanciful to the absurd, one example
• 11:58
  being his claim to have a warm personal relationship with SBI director jag Or Hoover.
• 12:07
  If you know what I'm saying, Wink wink. Esterline states the friendship
• 12:13
  was so close that Hoover would slip away from Washington, fly to New Orleans
• 12:18
  by himself far and travel eighty miles to Baton Rouge, where he would confer
• 12:26
  with Esterling and his penis. M Yeah, anyone with the slightest knowledge of
• 12:41
  Hoover, there was just such a story. Is preposterous. Claims such as
• 12:50
  this make it easy to understand the comments and psychiatric reports nothing or noting easter
• 12:54
  Line. Easterling's grandiose delusions, comments echoed by many people who have known the
• 13:01
  man since the assassination. Seventy five hours were spent by the author and face
• 13:09
  to face interviews with Robert Easterling, including trips with him to areas where he
• 13:13
  declares events took place that are related to the assassination. Dozens more hours have
• 13:18
  been spent in telephone conversations. Born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, on June thirtieth,
• 13:28
  nineteen twenty six, Easterling dropped out of high school to travel with the
• 13:31
  rodeo and thus earned the nickname of Cowboy Bick. Cowboy Bob. Easterly later
• 13:46
  lend work on engines, and his most frequent legitimate occupation has been a diesel
• 13:50
  mechanic, working for oil drilling companies and construction contractors, primarily in Texas,
• 13:58
  oh Louis, Anna, and Mississippi. At times he operated a bulldozer,
• 14:03
  and it was this sort of work that earned him his best known sober quick
• 14:09
  hard hat. That is a fancy fucking French name for nickname. So this
• 14:16
  guy's nickname was hard Hat. He has lived under several false names. His
• 14:24
  most commonly used alias during the years following the assassination was the name George Taylor,
• 14:35
  piece together easter Lyon's life, Esterling, Easterling. I'm gonna fuck this
• 14:41
  name up for the rest of the show, folks, just show you know.
• 14:43
  It's so close to Jake Esterlin, which I'm so used to saying.
• 14:48
  Sorry. So Easterling's life was that of a quintessential loser loser. The partially
• 14:56
  redeeming feature noted by friends, enemies, family, and employers, that is
• 15:00
  that easterlingcaus this is a bright and inventive mind, although one terribly ravaged by
• 15:07
  alcoholism. It was this very characteristic of brightness that caused the most concerned in
• 15:13
  trying to verify the confession of Robert Easterling. Was it all fabrication? One
• 15:18
  so masterfully and suddenly turned that there was just enough enticing elements to lure one
• 15:24
  in under the best of circumstances, on the periphery of his story could be
• 15:28
  checked. So from the start it was clear there would be no tidy package
• 15:33
  of confirmation, no chance of a claim that the confession checked out beyond a
• 15:39
  reasonable doubt. Funny because that's the title of his book. Despite all these
• 15:46
  negative factors, Easterling's account of his participation in the assassination. Conspiracy was verified
• 15:52
  in ways that, even if peripheral, simply could not be ignored. Soon
• 15:58
  after Easterling's Easterling's telephone call, the author sent a registered letter to FBI Director
• 16:06
  William Webster describing the circumstances of Easterling's confession. The letter also informed Webster,
• 16:12
  but Easterlings claimed knowledge of other grimly serious crimes. In response to the letter,
• 16:22
  FBI agents were sent to talk to the author, who provided Easterling's address,
• 16:26
  and at the request of the FBI, the author also turned over current
• 16:30
  photographs of Easterling and the twenty five thousand released FBI and Secret Service interviews of
• 16:37
  people claiming information about the assassination. There is not a single known example of
• 16:41
  an individual stepping forward to offer a confession of his own participation. I don't
• 16:49
  know if that's true. Robert Easterling was first committed to a mental institution in
• 16:56
  nineteen seventy four, more than ten years after the assassination. There is not
• 17:02
  a hint in the hospital records that he mentioned anything about the JFK case at
• 17:06
  that time. However, in subsequent commitments, notably after the assassination, attempts
• 17:11
  against President Gerald Ford. In nineteen seventy five, easter Lane got in touch
• 17:17
  with the FBI Cohortly afterward, he was interviewed by a Secret Service agent,
• 17:22
  whom easter Ling says he tried to persuade of the veracity of his account.
• 17:26
  He claimed the man he knew as the rifle marksman who killed Kennedy had said
• 17:30
  he hoped to kill the second United States president in his lifetime. The attempt
• 17:37
  on Ford was seen by Easterling as possible evidence of this, which is what
• 17:41
  he says first compelled him to turn into the authorities. However, indications are
• 17:47
  at that time easter Lyn has tried to provide his account to the FBI.
• 17:51
  He has been sent to the Secret Service. As late as nineteen eighty two,
• 17:56
  the Secret Service again listened to easter lying story, presumably as it might
• 18:00
  pertain to the safety of the current president. While little is known about how
• 18:04
  the Secret Service responded, it is fairly clear that the FBI never took him
• 18:08
  seriously. Following easter Easterling's released from his initial confinement to a mental institution,
• 18:18
  it appears he attempted several times to relate his story in a form where it
• 18:22
  might attract official attention. He knew that the Secret Service officials had nothing to
• 18:27
  do with investigating the murder of President Kennedy, and yet that was the direction
• 18:33
  in which he was always sent. He told the story to drinking companions and
• 18:38
  family members, and even attempted to interest various publications. For a host of
• 18:42
  reasons, a prominent one being Easterling's character and demeanor, nobody took him seriously
• 18:49
  from the beginning. There has been obvious possibility that Easterling's story is a delusion
• 18:55
  or fabrication, or an elaborate hoax with antisede and so obscure that they can
• 19:00
  never be identified. But if his confession is a hoax, and to be
• 19:06
  sure, Easterlyne would have no compunction about committing any of the exception, then
• 19:11
  there is a fascinating story to be told by such an extraordinary scheme. So,
• 19:18
  like I said, he spent over seventy five hours with this author relating
• 19:22
  this countless more on the phone, face to face visits things of his nature.
• 19:30
  Off for an elaborate hoax, I don't know, well, I mean,
• 19:36
  look how many hours due to Barry Baker has committed to her hoax.
• 19:38
  So anything is possible, I suppose. So there's your little bit of background
• 19:45
  on Robert Easterly. So what does he say about his involvement in the Kennedy
• 19:51
  assassination. Well, interestingly enough, it starts off at the Havannah Bar in
• 20:04
  Louisiana, owned by Orestes Pania. Now in early sixty three, Easterling lived
• 20:12
  in a trailer park at the Windmill Trailer Court in Marrero, Louisiana, just
• 20:18
  across the Mississippi River from New Orleans. He was working for one of the
• 20:23
  dozens of oil companies located on the river's west side. His job at the
• 20:29
  time was primarily working on diesel engines, a trade in which he is acknowledged
• 20:34
  at which he is an acknowledged expert. Even the company owner who today claims
• 20:41
  Easterling was stealing from him con sees that Easterling was a damn good mechanic.
• 20:48
  Easterling's job often took him across the river and into New Orleans, where,
• 20:52
  using one of the company trucks, he picked up parts that it needed for
• 20:56
  his work. It was in this capacity that Easterling was then stopping regularly to
• 21:02
  drinks at the Habanah Bar, located at one seventeen to Cater Street. The
• 21:08
  habanah Bar denocate to tourists from the heart of New Orleans, famed French quarter
• 21:14
  of Flu a few blocks away. It was opened twenty four hours a day,
• 21:18
  but as chief customers were exiled Cubans, sailors in port, and some
• 21:23
  businessmen who worked in the large office buildings on Canal Street less than a block
• 21:27
  away, directly across the narrow street from the Habannah Bar was one side of
• 21:33
  the huge granite US customers building. Within blocks was the center of US intelligence
• 21:38
  operations then going on around New Orleans. These operations related primarily to the official
• 21:45
  efforts of the US government to instigate through the Cuban exile community the overthrow of
• 21:51
  the Castro regime. There's little question about the prominence of the habanah Bar as
• 21:59
  a haven for excuse me, Cuban exile activities. In the early sixties,
• 22:03
  Ores Paanya, the bar's owner, was a leading member of the CRC,
• 22:11
  otherwise known as the Cuban Revolutionary Council. Now in this connection, Penya served
• 22:18
  as a source for the FBI. In nineteen eighty two, Painia told the
• 22:23
  author that he had a similar relationship with the Cia. Indeed, such a
• 22:29
  dual relationship was not uncommon during these stormy days in New Orleans. Such government
• 22:33
  connections enhanced pinions prominence, as well as the prominence of the abandoned bar in
• 22:40
  the Cuban exile cause. From the time of Castro's seizure of power in Cuba
• 22:45
  in January of nineteen fifty nine, New Orleans was a haven for displace of
• 22:49
  Cubans. First, there were the established professionals and government officials who had fled,
• 22:57
  and then came the wave of Cubans who decided that Castro was undesirable as
• 23:02
  a dictator, that they had helped him overthrow. Robert Easterling, Naturally loacious
• 23:10
  and a generous drinking companion, knew a smattering of Spanish. He'd sit easily
• 23:15
  into the camaraderie and intrigue that swirled through the Havannah Bar, and he understood
• 23:19
  the disenchantment of the Keuban exiles. Invariably, President Kennedy was the focus of
• 23:26
  attention during heated arguments what's to be done about Castro? To some extent,
• 23:30
  all the diverse forces threatening Kennedy were present at the Havannah Bar, creating in
• 23:36
  that establishment almost at a microcosm of the city itself. It was in that
• 23:41
  bar on a Friday afternoon in February nineteen sixty three that Robert Eastering encountered an
• 23:47
  acquaintance who he declares enlisted him in the conspiracy that led to the death of
• 23:53
  John F. Kennedy. As he walked into the Abanda Bar that afternoon,
• 24:00
  Easterlyn was wearing the white hard hat which had earned him his nickname. The
• 24:03
  Cuban who across the room called out to him, Hey, hot hat,
• 24:08
  hard hat. Easterlyn, who was blind in one eye from an accident,
• 24:12
  peered through the dimness and to his surprise, recognized a man. It was
• 24:18
  Manuel Rivera, an acquaintance who he had last seen in nineteen sixty one.
• 24:23
  Since it was crowded around the bar, Easterlyn waved indolarsment took a seat at
• 24:27
  a nearby table in order to drink. Spanish music blared from blared from a
• 24:33
  jukebox. Men bantered with the girls who worked the bar, as well as
• 24:38
  with the prostitutes who hung around the establishment. Occasionally, Easterlyn overheard a discussion
• 24:45
  at the bar. Apparently Manuel had just arrived in a small plane from Cuba,
• 24:49
  bringing Roman cigars that were displayed behind the bar. Easterlyn had first met
• 24:55
  Manuel Rivera in November nineteen sixty. The Cuban was then just twenty five.
• 25:00
  Jusil describes him as being five foot six, stocky build, oval face,
• 25:07
  receding hairline, black mustache, and hairy arms. He also had a noticeable
• 25:14
  gold tooth and a brown birthmark on the right side of his neck. Easterling
• 25:18
  had been immediately impressed by Rivera's self assurance and ingenuity, yes ingenuity in various
• 25:26
  illegal activities such as lock picking, safe cracking, and their procurements of young
• 25:33
  girls. At that time, Rivera was involved with organized crime in New Orleans
• 25:40
  as a numbers runner. Humans with whom Easterling worked placed their weekly bets with
• 25:45
  Rivera in the mob's numbers racket. Easterling had occasionally asked Manuel to send him
• 25:52
  a prostitute at the Tamanaka A motel on Tulane Avenue, not far from the
• 25:56
  main district of New Orleans. He had been given a telephone number where he
• 26:03
  was able to reach Rivera on occasions when he wanted such services. He had
• 26:07
  last seen Rivera at a bar on Airline Highway outside New Orleans. There,
• 26:12
  he said, Rivera, Easterling, and several Cubans were in the company of
• 26:17
  a prominent US military figure with whom they were discussing Cuban invasion plans. At
• 26:25
  the end of the conversation, Rivera's told Easterling that they might not see each
• 26:29
  other again. Indeed, Easterling had not seen Manuel Rivera until that Friday afternoon,
• 26:34
  so where had he been. As he was later to tell Easterling,
• 26:40
  Rivera had lived through extraordinary adventures in the past two years. They were adventures,
• 26:45
  as he related them, which would leave a dispassionate observer days and trying
• 26:49
  to comprehend Manuel's true allegiances. He was to tell Easterling at various times that
• 26:56
  he was working for the CIA against Castro, only later to claim that in
• 27:00
  truth, he was working all along Forecastro as a double agent. He said
• 27:04
  that he had done. He said that he had been one of the Cubans
• 27:07
  recuter by the CIA to kill Castro, but that he had tipped off the
• 27:11
  Cuban leader so that Castro was safe when the explosives intended to kill him were
• 27:17
  detonated. Manuel claimed to have warned Castro about the invasion planned at the Bay
• 27:22
  of Pigs. Rivera also told Easterly that since he last saw him, he
• 27:27
  had been captured by Castro during the Bay of Pigs invasion and then sent to
• 27:32
  the Soviet Union, where he received training in the Russian language, as well
• 27:36
  as techniques of sabotage an assassination. But Easterly knew that none of these.
• 27:42
  But Easterly knew none of these things. As he sat in the Havannah bar
• 27:45
  that Friday afternoon, he was glad to see Rivera, chiefly because he knew
• 27:51
  that Rivera possessed attributes that Easterly found useful in his own illegal activities. As
• 27:57
  he sat there, he noticed standing at the bar with Manuel, one of
• 28:00
  the strangest looking men he had ever seen. The man had prominent dark eyes,
• 28:07
  but more notably, was completely hairless, like a baby Gerbil, without
• 28:14
  eyebrow's facial hair or hair on his head. This was David W. Ferry,
• 28:19
  the man who had just flown Manuel to New Orleans from Cuba. From
• 28:25
  his seat, easter Lincoln see that the men had a rifle they were passing
• 28:27
  back and forth. Also president at the bar was a New Orleans businessman whom
• 28:32
  Easterlynne believes was Clay Shaw, along with the Cuban named Joe, whom Easterlynne
• 28:37
  had not been able to identify. When Ferry and his companions left, Easterlyne
• 28:44
  got up and approached Manuel Rivera, who would begin tending the bar. Rivera
• 28:49
  Reserve or Rivera served Eastneling a drink, and the two men began to renew
• 28:53
  their acquaintance. It was during this conversation that Rivera told him that he and
• 28:59
  the men who had just left the bar were hancing a plot to kill President
• 29:03
  Kennedy. Easterling recalls that Manuelood looked at him and said, I want you
• 29:07
  to help us, and I'll pay you well. Easterling agreed, Let's steal
• 29:12
  the bastard he betrayed us. At the Bay of Pigs. It was then
• 29:21
  that Rivera showed easterly a magnificent and magnificent check made automatic rifle. He explained
• 29:29
  he had personally supervised his design and construction at a gun factory in Czechoslovakia.
• 29:34
  He pointed out a unique feature of the rifle catch box on the side.
• 29:38
  Divine said that objected shells would not be scattered and lost when fired. They
• 29:44
  would be caught in a cuplike box attached to the side of the rifle.
• 29:48
  Easterlyn dam and the rifle. He noticed that the only imprints stated seven millimeter,
• 29:53
  which he as soon meant that it had used seven millimeter cartridges. After
• 30:00
  this, Easterling went with Rivera out the bar and watched as he placed the
• 30:03
  check rifle in the back seat of his grave voltswagon. There was already another
• 30:07
  rifle on the car seat, which Easterling declared was a man barcano make allegedly
• 30:15
  used by Oswald to kill President Kennedy. Back inside the bar, Rivera explained
• 30:22
  that he needed a barrel of water into which he could fire the man liquor
• 30:26
  carcano rifle. He wanted to retrieve the bullets. Manuel said he needed to
• 30:32
  shoot them from the tailgated with trucks so that he could collect the ejected shells
• 30:34
  from the back of the truck. He also wanted a place where he could
• 30:38
  fire the check automatic he had just bought in Cuba. Easterling assured Rivera that
• 30:45
  he should have exommodate him in the spacious open field behind the trailer park where
• 30:48
  he lived across from the across the river from New Orleans. So The following
• 30:55
  afternoon, around four o'clock, Manuel Rivera arrived at Easterling's trailer. Easterling drove
• 31:00
  his pickup truck down into a large field behind the trailer park and backed the
• 31:04
  truck up until it was just beside a large barrel of water that was in
• 31:07
  the field. Manuel voted the manikers arcino and stood on the tailgate of the
• 31:15
  truck and fired downward into the water. Then the two men searched the back
• 31:19
  of the truck and found the ejected cartridge shells. Manuel dropped them into his
• 31:25
  pocket. After that, the men dumped over the barrel of water and retrieved
• 31:29
  the slugs. Manuel held one of them up in front of Easterling and told
• 31:33
  him that someday that slug would be famous. After Manuel pocketed the slugs,
• 31:41
  Eastling saw three men arrive in a large car. The first two were David
• 31:48
  Ferry and the man he believed to be Clay Shaw. The third man was
• 31:52
  the Cuban who had been with him at the bar, a man called Joe
• 31:56
  who had a slightly deformed hand. Manuel removed three traffic cones from his volkswagon
• 32:04
  and placed them in staggered positions several feet apart, about two hundred and fifty
• 32:09
  feet from where the men were standing. Upon each cone, Manuel placed a
• 32:14
  coconut. Then he walked to the spot where the other men had gathered.
• 32:20
  Manuel removed the Checkmate automatic rifle. The Cuban known as Joel Joe Joe held
• 32:27
  a stopwatch in his slightly deformed hand. Manuel fired quickly, drilling each of
• 32:35
  the coconuts. The time was a little over five seconds. Scratch one.
• 32:39
  Kenneddes that the Cuban would to stop watch. That'll get the job done,
• 32:45
  was a comment from the man easter Ling thought was Clay Shaw. David Fairy
• 32:50
  didn't say anything, He just smiled. Meanwhile, easter Ling's wife was in
• 32:55
  their trailer in sight of the field where the men were shooting. Told the
• 33:00
  author that while she recalls some men coming to the trailer park, she has
• 33:04
  no idea who they were. Although it was not unusual for men to target
• 33:07
  practice in the field on Saturday afternoons, there were several unusual details that have
• 33:13
  caused the event to stick in her mind. Before any of the shooting started,
• 33:16
  she recalled Easterlyn came to the trailer and demanded that she gave him some
• 33:21
  dish claws. It happened that she had several of them that she had just
• 33:25
  bought, and it was with some irritation that she let him have them.
• 33:30
  Twenty five years later, easter Lynn was asked what he remembered about using disc
• 33:34
  clause that day. At first he recalled nothing. Then after a few minutes
• 33:38
  he remembered that indeed he and Manuel had tried unsuccessfully to suspend the dish clause
• 33:45
  about halfway down in the barrel of water in order to catch the bullets in
• 33:49
  the cloth and thus avoid having to dump out all the water and risk losing
• 33:52
  the bullets. However, they realized the idea wouldn't work and abandon it.
• 33:59
  Easter Lying was surprised that his former wife recalled the dis clause, and there's
• 34:07
  the author's note says today she is remarried and spoke only with me with an
• 34:12
  agreement anonymity or his services. That afternoon, Robert Easterling claims he was paid
• 34:21
  five hundred bucks. That was easy money, even easier than cracking it safe.
• 34:25
  He eagerly awaited the next chance to do some work for Manuel Rivera The
• 34:35
  following Friday evening in late February, and another incident verified by moth by both
• 34:40
  Missus Easterling and one of her neighbors in large white car stopped near the trailer.
• 34:45
  It remained there for more than two hours before Easterling got home and several
• 34:52
  men excuse me and the car appeared to be Cubans. Missus Easterling was terrified
• 34:58
  when she saw the strangers watching her ti When Easterling arrived at the trailer and
• 35:04
  saw the car and heard his wife's report, he telephoned Rivera. He told
• 35:07
  him he was aware of the car. The men inside, he said,
• 35:10
  had guns with silencers and cans of gas. They want to kill you and
• 35:15
  your wife and burn your trailer to the ground, Riveri said, He explained.
• 35:21
  The humans feared that the Easterlings would talk about the events they observed the
• 35:24
  preceding Saturday in the field behind the trailer court Manuel said that he would be
• 35:30
  there in a few minutes. Waiting for Manuel to get there, Hims his
• 35:35
  Easterling recalls the terror she felt as she crouched on the floor of the trailer
• 35:37
  with the lights off, keeping her crying children from going to a window.
• 35:44
  Moments later, the fear passed, Manuel arrived and ordered them in away.
• 35:47
  About six weeks later, perhaps early April, Easterling stopped him to drink at
• 35:52
  the Hibanah bar. He was driving his brand new nineteen sixty three Ford XL
• 35:59
  pinned yellow black. It was a car he is still very proud of.
• 36:02
  Easterling states that he was in the bar drinking and talking to Rivera and they
• 36:07
  were discussing in general terms from the murder of Kennedy. It was then that
• 36:12
  Manuel stated to Easterling surprise, that he wanted a photograph of hard hat,
• 36:15
  that he needed a permanent record of all the men who were involved in such
• 36:20
  historically significant business. Yeah, that's not sketchy at all. Two men,
• 36:30
  a Cuban and another American, accompanied them to Easterling's car and where Manuel got
• 36:37
  behind the wheel hard hat. He got in the back seat, and balls
• 36:42
  of cotton were placed over his eyes and held him place by a large bandanna
• 36:45
  so that he could see nothing. Manuel drove for about thirty minutes, perhaps
• 36:50
  going in circles. At the destination Manuel referred to only as headquarters, the
• 36:57
  blindfold was removed. Easterling, wearing his hard hat, was photographed with a
• 37:02
  studio type camera. Then his fingerprints were taken. Easterling noticed that the lettering
• 37:08
  on the fingerprint cards was in Spanish. The photocopy was made of his driver's
• 37:14
  license, which bore his real name. There was a moment Easterling would never
• 37:19
  forget until that time, Easterling, Willie us Manual, and the others who
• 37:23
  had only called him hard Hat but not really known his true identity. Afterward,
• 37:30
  Manuel showed Easterling a heavily constructed rectangular wooden box which he had sel,
• 37:36
  which he had himself built. Odd in dimensions, it was five feet long,
• 37:40
  three feet wide, four feet high, and the floor was a false
• 37:45
  bottom and seeing like a compartment that housed a spring tensioned cradle designed to hold
• 37:51
  a rifle securely. Manuel then picked up the Checkmate automatic rifle, secured it
• 37:58
  in the cradle, and replaced the false floor. According to Easterling, no
• 38:02
  one would suspect that the heavy box contained anything. It appeared to be empty.
• 38:07
  Easterlingen Rivera returned to the abandon bar again. Manuel drove a hard Hat,
• 38:13
  blindfolded, sat in the back with a cuban. At one point,
• 38:16
  the cuban became agitated, pulled out a pistol and rested against Easterling's temple.
• 38:23
  He accused him of being an FBI agent. Easterling frantically denied it, and
• 38:29
  Manuel ordered the man to put away the pistol, explaining the hard hat.
• 38:32
  Part of the team, once back at the Havannah bar, huddled together so
• 38:37
  others could not overhear them. Manuel explain the details of the assassination plan to
• 38:45
  Esterling. A clauded for the rifle and box to be in place at the
• 38:47
  assassination site, and for the rifle to be concealed in the box. Following
• 38:52
  the shooting. There would be someone with a different rifle, a bolt action
• 38:58
  Man Liquor Carcano, who would unwittingly be on hand to take the blame.
• 39:04
  The real assassin's rifle would be so well concealed that it could be smuggled out
• 39:07
  much later. Phills fired from the man Liquor Carcano would be placed at the
• 39:13
  scene. A bullet fired from the man Liquor Carcano would be planted in an
• 39:17
  area where it will be discovered and become prime evidence steal the case against the
• 39:22
  Man Liquor Carcano and its owner. The bullets for the seven millimeter check made
• 39:29
  automatic were designed to practically disintegrate into untraceable fragments. Upon impact the bullets,
• 39:36
  Easterling Saul had slits in the cut in the side. After relating all this,
• 39:40
  Manuel Rivera told Easterling that he was going to need his continuing help and
• 39:45
  gave him another seven hundred and fifty dollars. Easterling's next assignment was in May.
• 39:52
  The Cuban team to his trailer around eight one morning and said that he
• 39:58
  needed to borrow his car to transport and box and rifles to Texas. The
• 40:02
  plan was to hook a U haul trailer to the car to carry the large
• 40:06
  box. Easterlyn gave Rivera the keys to his car and Manuel departed, saying
• 40:10
  he would return the car in a few days. Easterlyn claims nothing further to
• 40:16
  do with the transport of the box. His next contact was a few days
• 40:22
  later when Manuel returned the car along with the car keys. Rivera gave Easterling
• 40:28
  a time magazine that had eight hundred and fifty dollars took inside the pages.
• 40:37
  All right, so we're in May, folks, and a box containing a
• 40:44
  check made fully automatic seven millimeter rifle has been dispatched to Dallas, Texas using
• 40:52
  Easterling's brand new car was at this moment he knew he fucked up. Enter
• 41:04
  Lee Harvey Oswald. It was deep into a muggy New Orleans night in nineteen
• 41:10
  sixty three when the odd pair entered the Habana Bar. One of the men
• 41:15
  was stockily built, possibly a Cuban about twenty eight, with the receding hairline.
• 41:20
  He ordered the tequila. The Latin's companion was an American who seemed to
• 41:25
  be drunk. It was this young man who made the post midnight visit memorable.
• 41:31
  He ordered a lemonade, the first time that drink was ever ordered in
• 41:37
  the Havannah bar. The bar tender did not know how to fix it or
• 41:43
  the owner of the bar was asked to give directions on how to make the
• 41:45
  lemonade. Once the drink was served, the American's companion made a plastic remark
• 41:52
  about the price of twenty five cents set by Penia. He considered this exorbitant,
• 42:00
  muttered something about Cuban capitalists. Then the American vomited all over the table
• 42:06
  at which they at which he and his Latin friend were seated. It was
• 42:09
  only then that they left. Months later, following the assassination of Kennedy,
• 42:17
  this incident was vividly recalled with unanimity unity unanimity is that a word? Why
• 42:31
  those who he witnessed it? The identity of the Cuban in the bar that
• 42:35
  night remains a mystery, although the description of him in the Morning Commissioned Records
• 42:39
  it is virtually identical to Easterlen's description of Manuel Rivera, but there is a
• 42:45
  little question about the identity of the American he was Lee Harvey Oswald. Robert
• 42:52
  Eastling was not among the witnesses in the Avanda Bar that night. Eastelyn claims
• 42:57
  that he first encountered Oswald during the spring summer of sixty three. While he
• 43:01
  was not sure of the date, Easterlyn insisted he witnessed an incident involving Oswald
• 43:07
  at the end the Habanda Bar that is unrecorded in standard accounts of Oswald's New
• 43:12
  Orleans activities. Easterlynn claims he came upon a sidewalk fracas on Decatur Street near
• 43:19
  the doorway to the Avanda Bar. Several Cubans were kicking and stomping a young
• 43:24
  man. Easterlyne came to know his Oswald. As Easterlyne stood watching, Rivera
• 43:30
  rushed out of the bar with a brooken beer bottle and forced the men to
• 43:34
  stop beating Oswald. Police officers arrived at about that time, and the stuff
• 43:39
  will ending. Easterlyn claims that Oswald got up and without any comment, walked
• 43:45
  away. Easterlene did not did not learn what the altercation was about. Easterlyne
• 43:53
  he saw Oswald on several other occasions that spring. When Rivera and Oswald were
• 43:59
  together, according to Easterling, they spoke to each other in Russian. Manuel
• 44:05
  told Easterling that he first met Oswald hold on Folks in Czechoslovakia when the automatic
• 44:13
  rifle was built. He said that Oswald fired the rifle and was downright terrible
• 44:20
  with it. At some point after hard had met Oswald, Rivera confided that
• 44:25
  Oswald was going to take a nap or take the rat for the assassination,
• 44:30
  not take a nap, take the rat for the assassination of President Kennedy.
• 44:36
  Easterly instantly realized this was the man the conspirators had chosen as their duke,
• 44:40
  and who would have and who would have a man liquor carclino rifle. Manuel
• 44:49
  explained that it would be necessary to kill Oswald after the assassination. While this
• 44:54
  did little to clarify in Easterling's mind just what was going on, and one
• 44:59
  chilling fact came into focus that if Oswald was so expendable, then there was
• 45:04
  little reason to believe the conspirators would want him Easterlyn around after it was all
• 45:08
  over. At first, easter Lynn believed the ballistics evidence generated during the practice
• 45:15
  firing at the Windmill Trailer Court would be used to since the case against Oswald.
• 45:20
  However, it is a matter of record that Oswald did not order his
• 45:22
  Mani Ker carcano until March, while he was still in Dallas, So if
• 45:28
  the Easterlings account is true, the rifle firing at the trailer park in February
• 45:32
  was simply a dry run for later doing the same thing with Oswald's rifle.
• 45:38
  Just one of the many things wrong with this story, folks, whom there
• 45:43
  are many believe me. By April, Oswald was in New Orleans and apparently
• 45:46
  had his rifle with him. The setup of the trailer court was such that
• 45:51
  it would be quite simple for Manuel and his colleagues to return there and conduct
• 45:54
  the additional firings. While Easterlyn never witnessed such an activity, he had moved
• 46:00
  out of the trailer court by the end of June. Other witnesses have told
• 46:05
  the author that it was not uncommon to sign people target cheating in that particular
• 46:09
  field. Next up, we have an account of Easterlin delivering a suitcase containing
• 46:20
  one hundred thousand dollars folks. So it was in a businessman's office that his
• 46:30
  transaction took place. At about ten o'clock on a Sunday morning, two men
• 46:36
  arrived. One was the person Eastern believed to be Clay Shaw, who in
• 46:40
  reality might have been Guy Banister. The second was a man from Dallas named
• 46:45
  Jack Ruby. The men checked the cash in the suitcase. Ruby then went
• 46:51
  to the phone and placed a call to a man in Dallas. After some
• 46:54
  perfunctory conversation, Ruby handed the phone to his companion for several minutes and then
• 47:00
  hung up. At one point, the businessman asked Ruby if he was going
• 47:05
  to be able to take care of so much cash. According to Easterling,
• 47:08
  Ruby pulled back his seat jacket, pointed to a pistol and said, yeah,
• 47:13
  I got my little heat at. As Ruby and his companions left,
• 47:17
  Easterling looked out at their car and saw two men sitting inside. He believes
• 47:22
  that they were Manuel Rivera and the Cuban known to Easterling as Joe. It
• 47:28
  was after the men drove away that the businessman told Easterling that, although he
• 47:31
  was not certain, he suspected that this was all part of a plot to
• 47:36
  kill President Kennedy. He pulled from his desk a small tape recorder that was
• 47:40
  attached to his telephone line. He indicated that he had taped the phone call
• 47:45
  that Jack Ruby had made to Dallas. Now, he played the tape so
• 47:50
  that he and Easterling could hear the entire conversation. What stuck most vividly in
• 47:54
  the Easterling's mind was one comment made by a Dallas oil man. Don't pay
• 48:00
  the bastards too much because it will run up the price on Bobby and the
• 48:06
  rest of them. Hard hat, the businessman said, they're going to kill
• 48:10
  the Kennedys. He then proceeded to burn the tape in an ash. Training
• 48:22
  was getting scared, housterly, concedes, and the more he thought about it,
• 48:25
  the more frightened he became. An addition, the irs was threatening him
• 48:30
  for his failure to pay income taxes, and he believed his employer had caught
• 48:35
  him stealing parts and were selling them. A few days after the meeting at
• 48:39
  the businessman's office to transfer the cash, he Usteling put his job. According
• 48:45
  to his wife of that period, he urged her to move into an apartment
• 48:47
  and to sell the trailer since the Cubans knew where it was. Hard Hat
• 48:53
  abruptly left Louisiana and did not stop until he reached Ohio, where he got
• 48:58
  a job with a construction company. Feel fearful or not, Easterlyn knew it
• 49:04
  would be it would be a mistake to completely sever his relationship with Manuel Rivera,
• 49:08
  and not long after he reached Ohio, he telephoned Manuel to let him
• 49:14
  know where he was in case he wanted an additional work done. Easterlyn was
• 49:19
  greatly attracted to easy money. He called Manuel several more times over the summer
• 49:25
  to say that he was available. Towards the ends of September, Easterlyn got
• 49:30
  a message to telephone Manuel, who told him it's time to get Oswald out
• 49:36
  of town. Manuel told him to return to New Orleans and meet him at
• 49:40
  the Habanda Bar. He instructed him to give his fast, and so forward
• 49:44
  gassed up and ready for travel. During the third week of September, early
• 49:50
  in the morning, Easterly arrived at the abandon bar. Manuel Rivera was there,
• 49:55
  along with the Cuban named Joe. The first thing Easterling did was to
• 50:00
  begin drinking. The fear that had propelled him from New Orleans to Ohio had
• 50:05
  not moderated. Upon his return to Decatur Street, Easterling noticed that Manuel had
• 50:12
  with him the green suitcase with the burn mark. It was the same one
• 50:15
  that hard had had bought backed one hundred thousand dollars in cash for Jack Ruby
• 50:20
  and the man who may have been Clay Shaw where guy banister. Eastering observed
• 50:27
  to Manuel that he recognized the suitcase and assumed that it meant that Manuel had
• 50:30
  gotten the money. Manuel nodded and smiled. I liked to be paid both
• 50:37
  ways, he said to Easterling. These words confirmed to the Manuel's activities were
• 50:42
  serving the interests of both Cuban and domestic conspirators. It was then that Many
• 50:49
  picked up the phone, dial the number and said, Hardly had it here,
• 50:52
  and we are ready to start the fire. Manuel told Easterling that they
• 50:58
  were waited about fifteen minutes and pick up Lee Oswald and drive him to Houston.
• 51:04
  Easterlyn gulped down several more drinks, and Manuel ordered a full bottle of
• 51:07
  whiskey for them to drink during their long drive. Rivera and Easterling bade farewell
• 51:15
  to Joe and walked out of the Havannah bar onto Decatur Street. They removed
• 51:21
  the license plates from Easterling's car, got in headed across Canal Street where a
• 51:28
  Decatur becomes Magazine Street, and Manuel gave Easterling concise directions about each turn to
• 51:34
  make and today Easterling, amidst his disorientation concerning how he reached the scene of
• 51:38
  a large fire enough to require several fire trucks and hoses pulled across the street
• 51:45
  on the way to the fire, Manuel's hold Easterling that he knew that Oswald
• 51:51
  had been under surveillance recently because of his pro cast activities with the Fair Play
• 51:55
  for Cuba Committee. Manuel said it was necessary to set the fire as a
• 52:00
  diversionary tactic in order to pick up Oswald surreptitiously in the confusion and get him
• 52:06
  out of town and on his way to Mexico. Manuel said that he wanted
• 52:10
  Easterling to drive Oswald all the way, but Oswald insisted on taking the bus
• 52:15
  However, when Oswald realized how tight the surveillance on him was, according to
• 52:20
  Manuel, he agreed to be spirited out of New Orleans, so he catched
• 52:23
  the bus in Houston, less than sober by the time they reached the fire.
• 52:30
  Easterly remembers the fire engines and sirens, most vividly the fact that several
• 52:36
  times he had to run his car over the fire hoses. When after passing
• 52:42
  the fire on the right, Manuel ordered him to double back and cross the
• 52:45
  hoses again. His fuzzy recollection is that the fire was at a church in
• 52:50
  a black neighborhood. Easterling finally stopped across from the fire and waited while Manuel
• 52:59
  ran into a bill that had some small steps in front. Easterly noticed as
• 53:02
  he looked across the street that the smoke was coming out of the rear of
• 53:07
  a wooden building. Manuel promptly returned with Oswald in tow, with his head
• 53:12
  duck down. As he darted from the building. Oswald got in the back
• 53:15
  of the seat of the car and stretched out with a blanket over him.
• 53:19
  Easterlying gunned the engine and they sped away. According to Easterling, men in
• 53:24
  an unmarked car. He could have been FBI, he gave Chase. There
• 53:28
  was a wild ride along the broad New Orleans streets as easterling at speeds of
• 53:32
  up to one hundred miles an hour, and headed out of the city.
• 53:37
  At one point on the outskirts of town, Manuel directed them into a residential
• 53:42
  section, where they pulled into somebody's carport and parked from a little bit,
• 53:45
  hoping to evade their pursuers. They remained there until the owner of the car
• 53:51
  port returned home and noticed them. They put the license plate back on one
• 53:53
  and departed. By then they had eluded their pursuers on the trip to Houston,
• 54:00
  and Oswald said virtually nothing. Most of the time he was lying down
• 54:04
  on the back seat, and during other times he quietly looked out the window.
• 54:08
  They made one stop during the three hundred and sixty mile drive, and
• 54:12
  Oswald got out to use the restroom and to buy some food and drink.
• 54:15
  Easterlyin reports no substantive conversation between Oswald and Rivera and Houston. The trio went
• 54:22
  to the bus station. Easterly and Rivera waited in the car while Oswald went
• 54:28
  in alone. In a few minutes, Oswald returned with a young man who
• 54:30
  looked strikingly like himself. Manuel introduced the young man as Carlo. Easterlyn's impression
• 54:38
  was that Carlo was able to speak great little English. In fact, the
• 54:42
  only words English Easterlyn heard him utter were good luck to you. Easterlyn claims
• 54:49
  that Carlo, Manuel, and Oswald all spoke in Russian. Then a few
• 54:53
  minutes after their arrival, Manuel asked Easterlin to take a photograph of the three
• 54:58
  of them standing together. Carlow stood on Manuel's left and Oswald on the right.
• 55:02
  Eataline took the picture with Manuel's camera. Eathaline recalls that Carlo was no
• 55:08
  more than an inch taller than Oswald and a little heavier. Soon after taking
• 55:14
  the picture, Easterling said farewell to the three men and drove away. Manuel
• 55:19
  had paid him fifteen hundred dollars and given him his next assignment to drive to
• 55:22
  Monterey, Mexico. He was dewaight at a motel there for Oswald to arrive
• 55:28
  a few days later. Easterling was then to drive Oswald back to Fort Worth.
• 55:36
  All right, so you can't make the ship up, folks. So
• 55:42
  now we have this whole thing meeting up with the Oswald spiriting him away from
• 55:47
  a fire under the cover of darkness, out running FBI agents all the way
• 55:53
  to Houston, Texas. And Oswald is going to take a bus to Texas,
• 56:00
  and as easter Ling fellow is driving his car to Monterey to pick up
• 56:04
  Oswald and bring him back to Fort Worth. Okay, Now, at this
• 56:10
  point in the story, we have a lot of Russian wall activities being done
• 56:15
  here, but we also have some concrete sacks, places and names that can
• 56:22
  be checked out. And in fact, it's time in the early eighties,
• 56:29
  arrest Pinion was still alive, so it probably behooved the author to talk to
• 56:35
  him and see if he could corroborate any of this guy's story whatsoever. So,
• 56:44
  according to the easter Lyne's story easter Ling's story at damn It, you
• 56:50
  know, Oswald was in New Orleans at all the right times in his story.
• 56:55
  Easter Ling's employment, as he described it as verified his ex wife is
• 57:00
  able to corroborate much of his account of the shooting at Windmill Trailer Court.
• 57:05
  Even a neighbor twenty years later recalled the incident the Cubans threatening to burn the
• 57:08
  trailer down. Easterling had returned to the trailer park with the author, and
• 57:14
  the conditions are just as he described him. On the other hand, arrest
• 57:19
  Painia, owner of the Cabana Bar, has told the author that he does
• 57:22
  not remember a man called hard Hat, nor does Painia recall a man called
• 57:30
  Joe who had a deformed hand and hung around his establishment, often tending bar.
• 57:37
  Mania certainly does not recall an assassination plot against Kennedy being hatched there,
• 57:43
  although he concedes he heard people in his bar talking about killing the President pain
• 57:49
  He confirms that David Ferrrien Anne clay Shaw with both patrons of the bar.
• 57:55
  To Painia, recall a Manuel Rivera. He looks at the author and said,
• 58:00
  so many people asked me about Manuel Rivera, but yet he didn't exactly
• 58:06
  explain what that means. While only easterly places David Ferry with Manuel Rivera and
• 58:13
  the Czech rifle in the band of bar, there is other evidence that Ferry
• 58:16
  did frequent the establishment. Moreover, Ferry can be officially linked with Oswald on
• 58:22
  two occasions for various reasons unrelated to his now known Oswald connection. David Ferry
• 58:31
  was an immediate suspect when President Kennedy was killed Fieries Sarry. Yet Ferries series
• 58:40
  iron Clad Alibi illustrated not only the remarkable diversity of his associations, but his
• 58:47
  connections with another of the prime elements in interesting in eliminating Kennedy organized crime.
• 58:55
  As we have seen, at the hour of the assassinations, Ferry was in
• 58:59
  a federal courtroom in New Orleans with the organized crime boss Carlos Marcello, whose
• 59:06
  lawyer employed Ferry as an investigator. Federal investigators have found that Marcello himself number
• 59:13
  one target of Robert Kennedy's Justice Department and made at least one thread against President
• 59:17
  Kennedy. As for the June meeting with Jack Ruby, the New Orleans businessman,
• 59:22
  impossible and possibly shaw our banister, there are some significant points of confirmation.
• 59:30
  According to the official record, Ruby did visit New Orleans in June of
• 59:34
  nineteen sixty three. Moreover, it is known that while there, Ruby spent
• 59:38
  most of the time in association with the Club Operators, whose ties, even
• 59:44
  if informal, an associative rand to the organized crime family of Carlos Marcello.
• 59:51
  One of the club operators, a Herald Tannenbaum, was listed by the Select
• 59:55
  Committee as deceased quite alive. Tannenbaum had affirmed to the author his own contact
• 1:00:01
  with Ruby in New Orleans at this time, though he denies the mob links
• 1:00:07
  attributed to him by the HSCA. That's where Easterling's claimed that he encountered Oswald
• 1:00:13
  in a street scuffle unreported for the official record. There is tempting confirmation from
• 1:00:17
  an extremely obscure aspect of Oswald's murky biography. On August first, nineteen sixty
• 1:00:25
  three, Oswald wrote a letter to the head of the Fair Play for Cuba
• 1:00:29
  Committee in New York and reported it during his efforts to distribute handbills, he
• 1:00:36
  had been attacked by some Cuban exiles and that the incident robbed me of what
• 1:00:39
  support I had, leaving me alone. Oswald also wrote that he was officially
• 1:00:45
  fauted by police. The trouble with his account has always been that it was
• 1:00:50
  written more than a week prior to the date Oswald was arrested in the street
• 1:00:53
  scuffle. This anachronism has been cited by researchers as evidence that Oswald already was
• 1:01:00
  planning this stage in event that would lead to his arrest. When he wrote
• 1:01:02
  to the FPCC on August first. It was just as possible that the incident
• 1:01:08
  is the very one reported by Easterling, who also noted that the police showed
• 1:01:14
  up briefly. So yeah, folks, this is yeah. I always thought
• 1:01:21
  it was odd that he wrote a letter to the Fair Play for JUBI Committee
• 1:01:23
  talking about, you know, a street scuffle while he was handing out handbills,
• 1:01:31
  you know, nine days before it actually happened. But what if this
• 1:01:36
  other incident actually took place? Very interesting stuff. Another confirming detail is that
• 1:01:44
  Easterlings acquaintance in association with the wealthy, wealthy businessman whom he claims he met
• 1:01:50
  with that Sunday morning to transfer the cash. That man, while denouncing Easterling
• 1:01:54
  as a drunken liar and scum of the earth, conceives that he knew hard
• 1:01:59
  hat over a number of years. He insisted he never engaged in any discussion
• 1:02:04
  of politics with him. He claims he has no particular political interests beyond casting
• 1:02:09
  his ballot. The businessman strenuously denies ever having a meeting such as the one
• 1:02:15
  described by Easterly. However, he concedes his business connection to the Dallas oil
• 1:02:22
  man in question, but insists he never met him or talked to him,
• 1:02:25
  even on the phone. In a telephone call from Easterly to the New Orleans
• 1:02:30
  businessman in May of nineteen eighty three, the businessman told hard Had if a
• 1:02:35
  word of this gets printed, I guarantee one thing you will regret it to
• 1:02:39
  the last day he live. There's a fascinating array of purely circumstantial evidence in
• 1:02:46
  indicating the businessman's preoccupation went to Jfka of Salls the Nation. Details completely unknown
• 1:02:52
  to Easterly. However, insomuch as it entirely possible that the businessman is telling
• 1:02:58
  the truth in his denial, he has not been identified here. Perhaps the
• 1:03:05
  most significant point of confirmation for Easterlanan's story has to do with his claim to
• 1:03:08
  have driven Oswald from New Orleans to Houston. There has never been any official
• 1:03:15
  explanation is that how Oswald got from New Orleans to Houston towards the end of
• 1:03:21
  September, despite a strenuous investigation aimed at discovering how Oswald made the trip,
• 1:03:28
  it seems nearly certain that he did not use any public transportation for the trip,
• 1:03:32
  But there has never until now been a rational conjecture about the details of
• 1:03:37
  this private transportation. In addition to this mystery is the question of the precise
• 1:03:43
  date of Oswald's departure from New Orleans. It has been established that Oswald's wife
• 1:03:47
  Marina aft a friend's station wagon and left New Orleans with a baby and friend
• 1:03:52
  on September the twenty third to return to Dallas. The last certain sighting of
• 1:03:57
  Oswald and New Orleans also occurred won that date. Because two events following the
• 1:04:04
  sighting, Oswald's boarding a bus near his apartment on the evening of September to
• 1:04:10
  twenty third, a highly ambiguous paper trail suggested Oswald remained in New Orleans as
• 1:04:15
  the latest September twenty fifth. Among the bits of evidence are the cashing of
• 1:04:20
  a check and the completion of a change of address card. However, if
• 1:04:26
  one is going to positive conspiracy, as did the HSCA, these transactions were
• 1:04:31
  conceivably carried out by someone other than Oswald. In any event, not a
• 1:04:36
  single witness and the official record could recall seeing Oswald in New Orleans after September
• 1:04:44
  twenty third. Now back to that fire, you know, when they went
• 1:04:49
  to pick Oswald up, Easterly was adamant that there was a fire, that
• 1:04:57
  he did run over hoses, and that there was a church by, and
• 1:05:00
  that it did happen in the area border by Canal in Magazine streets south of
• 1:05:03
  Claiborne Avenue. Initially, the investigation of this appeared hopeless. The New Orleans
• 1:05:10
  Fire Department claimed that the central fire records for those years do not be found.
• 1:05:15
  Newspapers reported no fires that could conceivably be the one described by Easterly.
• 1:05:21
  Arson records showed no cases pursued on fires that occurred around that time. Despite
• 1:05:29
  the author's strenuous assertions that he was lying, Easterly could not be shaken from
• 1:05:33
  his claim about the fire. It was then that investigator Tom Noonan, working
• 1:05:40
  with the author, made a startling discovery in the basement of the New Orleans
• 1:05:44
  Public Library. Many of the original fire report ledgers that had been kept at
• 1:05:49
  the each firehouse in the city actually existed, and even through the central records,
• 1:05:59
  which were based on the originals, could not be found there on a
• 1:06:01
  long ledges sheet and the sire handwriting of the New Orleans firement was an entry
• 1:06:08
  for September the twenty fourth, nineteen sixty three, the morning after the last
• 1:06:14
  known sighting with Oswald. The report of a fire was first received at nine
• 1:06:18
  twenty two am. The structure involved was an old two story wooden department building
• 1:06:25
  located in a black section of town diagonally had crossed from a church. The
• 1:06:30
  address two zero one one Melvmine was no more than a couple of minutes drive
• 1:06:36
  from where Easterly originally believed he and Manuel picked up Oswald. The fire report
• 1:06:45
  itself was unusuably. For all of September nineteen sixty three, in the second
• 1:06:50
  Fire District, there were one hundred and nineteen reports of fires listed in the
• 1:06:54
  ledgers. Of those, only three were reported to be under investigation. Perhaps
• 1:07:01
  most significant at all was the cause that a fire appeared apparently suspicious from the
• 1:07:05
  fireman noted that it was under investigation. So out of one hundred and nineteen
• 1:07:11
  fire reports, only three were suspected arson included this including this one. A
• 1:07:18
  key question was whether hoses might have been pulled across the street to reach the
• 1:07:21
  blaze at twenty eleven Melcomy. Inspection of that scene shows that the closest fire
• 1:07:29
  hydrant to the address was the agonally across the street and in front of the
• 1:07:32
  Israelite Baptist church. It would have been necessary to pull the hoses across the
• 1:07:38
  street if the pump on the scene did not have a sufficient water, a
• 1:07:43
  point of fact now uncheckable because New Orleans, like most cities, has a
• 1:07:47
  law that prohibits to driving across fire hoses. However, conversations with veteran New
• 1:07:54
  Orleans fireman indicate that there was a law rarely enforced twenty two years ago.
• 1:08:00
  At the time of the nineteen sixty three fire, the addressing question was in
• 1:08:04
  the heart of a rundown neighborhood primarily consisting of black families. Across from twenty
• 1:08:13
  eleven Melkman there was a small apartment building and two family houses of similar construction,
• 1:08:19
  as well as a larger building that housed the Tennessee Furniture Company. That
• 1:08:25
  building, it would appear, is most likely one for Oswald to have emerged
• 1:08:29
  from residents of the street recalled. It had a few steps leading up to
• 1:08:32
  a narrow stoop at the front. Other steps were on the side that led
• 1:08:36
  to small apartments. Today, the entire block from twenty eleven Meltmen has been
• 1:08:43
  colling down, and in place of the old building stands a modern fire station.
• 1:08:46
  Ironically enough, so let's talk about the Oudeo incident for a minute,
• 1:08:57
  since this is around the time same time that all this stuff happened. Apparently
• 1:09:02
  Easterling dropped off Oswald and two other Latins, Carlo and Manuel Rivera in Fort
• 1:09:13
  Worth or at Houston. I'm sorry, Houston. So questions remain about the
• 1:09:20
  dominant figure in the trio that visited missus Odeo. He was a Cuban who
• 1:09:25
  called himself Leopoldo, described as tall, slim, and wearing glasses. His
• 1:09:30
  appearance is starkly different from Easterling's description of Manuel Rivera. However, the third
• 1:09:36
  man, who was called something like Angelo, was described by missus Odio in
• 1:09:42
  terms that they are strikingly similar to description of Manuel. She recalled him as
• 1:09:48
  a man of medium height, stocky build, with heavy body hair. She
• 1:09:55
  recalled dark markings on his skin, which did have possibly be related to the
• 1:09:59
  birthmark Easterling claims was visible Manuel's neck. Missus Odio also recalled that one of
• 1:10:05
  the Cubans had sort of a bald spot in the front, which coincides with
• 1:10:11
  Easterling's claim that Manuel had a receiving hairline. In addition, missus Odio's description
• 1:10:16
  of Angelo had parallels that of a man who appeared with Oswald in the Hibana
• 1:10:21
  bar, a man who might have been Manuel Rivera. While no sure conclusions
• 1:10:29
  can be drawn from the parallels between Easterling and Odio descriptions, one thing is
• 1:10:33
  inescapable. If there is truth to the Easterling story, the man he knew
• 1:10:39
  is Manuel Rivera probably was not the dominant figure in the conspiracy. That figure
• 1:10:45
  would not be shooting into water barrels and dealing with the likes of Robert Easterling.
• 1:10:48
  That figure would logically be Manuel's superior. In this context, it is
• 1:10:56
  not unreasonable to speculate that there was a third man in Houston, one who
• 1:11:00
  joined Manuel in Carlo after Easterling left for Mexico. Perhaps that man Manuel's boss
• 1:11:06
  was the Leopoldo who appeared at the Odeo home to create one of the most
• 1:11:12
  memorable events that later would spring up to seal the guilt of Lee Harvey Oswald.
• 1:11:18
  Interesting So, for ten days, Robert Eastling waited at a motel in
• 1:11:27
  Monterey, Mexico, for Lee Harvey Oswald. When he realized that Oswald was
• 1:11:31
  not going to show up, he left and drove to several spots in Mexico.
• 1:11:35
  Then he drove back to back in Rearge and went to work operating a
• 1:11:40
  bulldozer on a construction project in Saint Francisville, Louisiana. By now it was
• 1:11:45
  mid October. Easterling's days alone in Mexico had given him time to realize,
• 1:11:51
  as he puts it, that my life wasn't worth a plug nickel. Never
• 1:11:57
  a stupid man, Easterling under stood that he and perhaps others were every bit
• 1:12:01
  as expendable as Lee Harvey Oswald. He was glad that Oswald and stood him
• 1:12:05
  up in Mexico and half hoped that he was finished with carrying out assignments for
• 1:12:10
  Rivera. Then one rainy day in early November, when he could not work,
• 1:12:16
  Easterling began drinking. He telephoned Manuel Rivera at his number in New Orleans,
• 1:12:23
  and of course the conversation he mentioned the name of the motel where he
• 1:12:26
  was where he was staying at Baton Rouge, and Manuel said that he was
• 1:12:30
  going to have a new assignment for him soon. A few days after that,
• 1:12:34
  several Cubans arrived at the motel and told Easterling that Manuel had sent them
• 1:12:39
  to make certain Easterling had not wavered in his readiness to follow orders, assured
• 1:12:45
  them of his steady loyalty to the cause. The Cubans told him when to
• 1:12:49
  phone Manual for his next assignment. They threatened to return if he failed to
• 1:12:55
  call, and so on Tuesday, November nineteenth, aster Ling tell phone the
• 1:13:00
  number where he had always reached Manuel during this time. Instead, David Ferry
• 1:13:05
  answered the phone. Manuel had gone to Dallas and Easterling's assignment, Ferry said,
• 1:13:14
  would be at a bus station in Dallas around ten thirty this swimming Friday
• 1:13:18
  morning. Ferry said that he would find Oswald waiting for him there, and
• 1:13:24
  Easterling was to drive Oswald to Mexico City, where Manuel would meet them.
• 1:13:30
  Easterling promised Ferry he would be in Dallas on November the twenty second to pick
• 1:13:33
  up Lee Harvey Oswald. The next two days were among the most terrible in
• 1:13:39
  his life. If he went through with his assignment picking up Oswald and Dallas,
• 1:13:43
  he was sure he would be killed along along with Lee once they reached
• 1:13:47
  Mexico. On the other hand, Manuel's henchman had repeatedly threatened at Eastering at
• 1:13:55
  any moment they could appear as they had in the past. If he actually
• 1:14:04
  skipped out on the assignment, he knew he would not hesitate. Who knew
• 1:14:09
  they would not hesitate to kill him? So Robert east DeLine is hard to
• 1:14:14
  put to salvage much honor from his role in these matters, but he is
• 1:14:18
  without shame when it comes to making the attempt. He asserts that through the
• 1:14:23
  entire time he was working as an informant for the FBI at the behest of
• 1:14:29
  the CIA, though he admits he never tried to report the developing conspiracy well.
• 1:14:35
  On Thursday, November the twenty first, he claims with frantic sincerity,
• 1:14:40
  the pressures of fear, confusion, and drunkenness captured conspired to drive him to
• 1:14:45
  drastic measures, so that evening on November the twenty first, nineteen sixty three,
• 1:14:51
  and nine thirty pm, he went to a public telephone booth at a
• 1:14:56
  service station just outside of Baton Rouge, down the operator and asked to be
• 1:15:00
  put through to Jane grew Hoover. They're going to kill the president, he
• 1:15:06
  shouted to the operator. Soon enough, Esterling says he was speaking to someone
• 1:15:12
  at FBI headquarters in Washington. The man asked if Easterlying owned the Yellow and
• 1:15:16
  black Ford XL. Easterling said that he did. You're in too deep,
• 1:15:23
  Easterling says. The FBI man told him, you're going to get killed.
• 1:15:28
  We have lines open to Dallas now, but they're going to kill the President.
• 1:15:32
  Easterling shouted. They have an automatic rifle with a catchbox on the side.
• 1:15:38
  We know, we know all about it, said the FBI man.
• 1:15:42
  According to Easterly, We're going to catch them red handed. You're in too
• 1:15:45
  deep. Whatever you do, don't go to Dallas. And Easterlying hung up.
• 1:15:50
  The FBI denies that it ever had any sort of informant relationship with Easterly.
• 1:15:56
  Suckingly enough, and according to an official bureaus statement, there is nothing
• 1:16:00
  n FBI files to substantiate mister Easterling's claim that he did call the FBI on
• 1:16:04
  the night of November twenty first, nineteen sixty three. Indeed, it's preposterous
• 1:16:11
  to think that anyone at the bureau would have made the statements Easterlyn claimed were
• 1:16:14
  made to him that night. However, much of what Easterlyn claims happened in
• 1:16:18
  the next few hours have been confirmed. Before long, it was past midnight,
• 1:16:24
  the calendar slipped to November twenty second, nineteen sixty three, and there
• 1:16:29
  was but one rational course of action for Easterlyn. He would commit a burglary
• 1:16:32
  that it's ever needed to provide a solid alibi if anyone tried to link them
• 1:16:38
  to the assassination, and at any time he felt in danger from his co
• 1:16:42
  conspirators, he finds safety by confessing to the break in and being jailed.
• 1:16:48
  Sounds a little bit like Richard Case and the Guel's Ship. Right on Airline
• 1:16:57
  Highway outside of Baton Rouge, there was a Gibbs discount center. Easterling had
• 1:17:01
  chased many times as he cast his paychecks there. At about one thirty am,
• 1:17:08
  he parked his car blocked from the store and walked to it With a
• 1:17:10
  sledgehammer. He hammered his way through concrete blocks and enter the building. Once
• 1:17:15
  inside, he immediately encountered a night watchman. Easterling fled to his car and
• 1:17:20
  took off at a high speed almost at once, perhaps even before the breaking
• 1:17:26
  was reported. A police car gave hot pursuit. After a high speed chase,
• 1:17:30
  Easterlyn crashed his car into a ditch. He jumped out and ran to
• 1:17:35
  the rest of the night. He walked in here as much as he as.
• 1:17:39
  He made his way towards the construction job, where soon after daybreak Friday
• 1:17:44
  morning, he could collect a paycheck. After cashing his check, Easterlyn caught
• 1:17:48
  a ride to a town where he could get a bus to Jackson, Mississippi.
• 1:17:54
  As he got off the bus in Jackson, he heard the first radio
• 1:17:57
  reports of the shooting of the President. He checked into the Heidelberg Hotel,
• 1:18:00
  Jackson's finest, and ordered up a supply of whiskey. He spent the next
• 1:18:05
  three days watching the events of Dallas unfold on television. Those events sealed forever
• 1:18:12
  any doubt in Easterling's mind about his fate if he had gone to Dallas.
• 1:18:16
  By Monday, Oswald had been murdered and Ruby was being held as his killer.
• 1:18:21
  Now using an assumed name, Easterling left the hotel and traveled to his
• 1:18:26
  mother's home near Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to tell her he would have to go
• 1:18:30
  away, perhaps for a long time. The next day he caught a bus
• 1:18:33
  out of Mississippi, and he cracked the safe in a small supermarket in Hagerstown,
• 1:18:38
  Maryland, and stole about three thousand dollars, which enabled him to continue
• 1:18:43
  his travels. As those funds ran low, Easterling headed south and stopped in
• 1:18:48
  Durham, North Carolina, where he broke into a Chevy dealer's ship. He
• 1:18:53
  cracked the safe and stole several thousand dollars and made a clean getaway. Twenty
• 1:18:58
  years later, Durham police confirmed such a break in at Carpenters Chevrolet on December
• 1:19:02
  seventeenth, nineteen sixty three. The police also confirmed Easterling's claim that the safe
• 1:19:09
  was on the second floor. The Durham authorities said the crime has never been
• 1:19:13
  solved. By early nineteen sixty four, Easterling was back in Hattiesburg and fighting
• 1:19:18
  out with relatives. On February the twenty second, the FBI picked him up
• 1:19:25
  on a fugitive warrant and returned him to Baton Rouge Baton Rouge to face charges.
• 1:19:30
  Had to break in there. On November the twenty second, nineteen sixty
• 1:19:33
  three, when the time came in his trial to offer a defense for his
• 1:19:39
  activities, Easterling pleaded guilty without comment. His lawyer so they had judged in
• 1:19:45
  Louisiana, remembers that Easterling seemed resigned to plead guilty and be sentenced with as
• 1:19:49
  little protests as possible. Court records show that for the November twenty second break
• 1:19:56
  in, Easterling was sentenced to five years in the Louisiana State Intentiary at Angola.
• 1:20:01
  In the FBI's official comment concerning Easterland's concession, a statement was offered the
• 1:20:08
  curious support to one of Easterly claims that the FBI has never listened seriously to
• 1:20:14
  him. In a letter to the author, the FBI stated, quote,
• 1:20:18
  the following information which appears in our files tends to indicate that mister Easterling's allegations
• 1:20:24
  regarding the assassination are unsupported by facts. Mister Easterling was not in Dallas,
• 1:20:30
  Texas on the Remember the twenty second with Lee Harvey Oswald's clone, as mister
• 1:20:38
  Easterling claims, he was fleeing the local authorities in Baton Rouge, Louisiana,
• 1:20:43
  who had interrupted his burglary of Gibson's Discount Center. When the Remember twenty nineteen
• 1:20:48
  sixty three, mister Easterling outdistanced his pursuers. So, in a taste to
• 1:20:56
  discredit Easterling's allegations, the Bureau demonstrate that, despite its claims to the contrary,
• 1:21:01
  it never took Easterland's concessions seriously enough excuse me to realize that he does
• 1:21:08
  not claim to have been in Dallas with Lee Harvey Oswalt's cloth. If the
• 1:21:13
  FBI is in possession of a prior statement to this effect, it has never
• 1:21:16
  disclosed it despite repeated efforts by the author to secure all of its information about
• 1:21:23
  Easterly. Easterland claims to have been doing precisely with the FBI investigation finds that
• 1:21:28
  he was doing during the early hours or November twenty second. If nothing else,
• 1:21:32
  this demonstrates it is late in September sixty three, the FBI continued to
• 1:21:35
  pay no serious attention to easterlands naimes, the familiar indifference that Easterling asserts met
• 1:21:43
  all of his earlier efforts to inform the authorities. It is a crowning irony
• 1:21:51
  that easter Ling's position should receive convincing FBI corroboration on the critical point of whether
• 1:22:00
  bureau who has ever paid serious attention to his account. Clearly, the FBI,
• 1:22:04
  in reality has given only perfunctory attention those allegations, allegations with potentially awesome
• 1:22:13
  significance, and now, like Paul Harvey, says, are you ready for
• 1:22:19
  the rest of the story. So as East Jelene's own admissions, you know,
• 1:22:29
  he doesn't really know exactly what happened. I'll November twenty six, November
• 1:22:33
  twenty two, nineteen sixty three, as he chose not to go to Dallas.
• 1:22:39
  So some years later, according to him, he was met. He
• 1:22:45
  had met a man by the name of Francisco of the Cuban intelligence services,
• 1:22:54
  and Francisco gave him a full report. There was base, he said on
• 1:23:02
  what Manuel Ray told him. Manuel Rivera sorry. Shortly before the motorca was
• 1:23:12
  due to arrive in Daily Plaza, Manuel took advantage of the gathering crowd to
• 1:23:17
  slip into the book depository, presumably it was not his first visit. He
• 1:23:24
  made his way to the sixth floor, overlooking the spacious plaza area below.
• 1:23:29
  He located his special box, even though there were dozens of other boxes of
• 1:23:33
  varying descriptions in the cavernous warehouse. Like Rooney Parlow, the Oswald look alike
• 1:23:40
  was already in the building. Numerous people saw him and later remembered him.
• 1:23:45
  Like the real Oswald, he kept to himself and said little. Since mid
• 1:23:48
  morning, the reality of Harvey Oswald had been at the bus station a flute
• 1:23:53
  a few blocks away, waiting to be picked up by Robert Easterley. During
• 1:23:59
  the minute before the arrival of the motorcade, Manuel and Carlo made their preparations.
• 1:24:03
  They made sure the man liquor carcano the Oswald rifle was dashed between some
• 1:24:10
  boxes at the other end of the room. Francisco claimed that they then took
• 1:24:14
  three empty cartridge shells that had been fired earlier from the Oswald rifle and placed
• 1:24:18
  them on the floor beside the assassin's window. Manuel removed the check rifle from
• 1:24:24
  the special box and checked it over. It all was ready. Manuel stood
• 1:24:30
  back in the window as he watched the presidential motorcade approaching his position. He
• 1:24:33
  could see the tan and smiling face of John Kennedy as he waved to the
• 1:24:39
  cheering crowds. As the president's limou made the turn from Houston onto Elm just
• 1:24:44
  below him, Manuel stepped to the window and crouched the head of the President.
• 1:24:48
  Filled the rifle scope. Manuel took a deep breath, expelled it slowly,
• 1:24:56
  and then squeezed the trigger With stunning speed and accuracy. He fired three
• 1:25:04
  times at five point six seconds to strike his moving target. His firing time
• 1:25:12
  had been even better on the coconuts, but this got the job done.
• 1:25:16
  Manuel waited a fraction of a second after the last shot to see if another
• 1:25:20
  was needed, but he could see that it wasn't necessary. He had blown
• 1:25:25
  apart to President's head. Moving quickly, Manuel returned the check rifle to his
• 1:25:30
  hiding place beneath the false bottom of the special box. At that moment,
• 1:25:34
  Carlo was dawdling about at the soda machine for four floors below. He was
• 1:25:41
  challenged by a police officer who was rushing past him to reach the upper floors
• 1:25:45
  of the building, but Carlo remained calm and said nothing. A man who
• 1:25:49
  worked in the building told policeman that Carlo, who he believed the Oswald,
• 1:25:55
  looked there. Carlo then made his way out of the building and melted away
• 1:26:00
  into the hysterical crowds. Within minutes, Nanuel Rivera had left the building at
• 1:26:09
  the parking lot. He and Carlo got into a car and were on their
• 1:26:12
  way home. At some point a little later, the nearly perfect bullet that
• 1:26:16
  had been fired from the Oswald rifle into a water barrel was placed on an
• 1:26:20
  unattended stretcher in a public corridor at Parkland Hospital, where the dying president had
• 1:26:27
  been taken. There was much Francisco did not tell Easterly. He did not
• 1:26:31
  say how it was arranged for Ruby to kill Oswald once hard had failed to
• 1:26:36
  pick him up and take him to Mexico. He did not say what Oswald
• 1:26:41
  believed to his role to be. However, he did explain that it was
• 1:26:45
  necessary to wait seven months before finding the opportunity to retrieve the special box and
• 1:26:50
  the check rifle from the book depository and returned them to Cuba. Among the
• 1:27:00
  items on the sixth floor that day were a few small cardboard cop cartans,
• 1:27:05
  now empty. The most prominent items on the floor were at least seven heavy
• 1:27:11
  wooden boxes. While not all the same size, the empty boxes were generally
• 1:27:15
  of odd dimensions, strikingly similar to the box described by Eastering. The boxes
• 1:27:21
  were stamped with the names of publishing companies such as Bob's Merrill and addressed to
• 1:27:27
  the Texas School Book Depository. One of the boxes, for example, bore
• 1:27:30
  a stamp which indicated it had once been used to ship five hundred copies of
• 1:27:35
  The Red Pony. Jordan Shook, a former Dallas official, who played an
• 1:27:41
  important role in the preservation of the building is regarded as an expert on the
• 1:27:45
  building and its usage since nineteen sixty three. He explained that at one point
• 1:27:50
  everything on the sixth floor was moved to another floor. Later, some of
• 1:27:55
  the things were returned to the sixth floor. Stiff stated that there had been
• 1:27:59
  no reason to keep track of what we've moved there. While no one can
• 1:28:02
  confirm that the boxes were on the sixth floor in nineteen sixty three, it
• 1:28:06
  is also impossible to state that they were never there. In any case,
• 1:28:11
  that is virtually indisputable that such boxes were somewhere in the building, and quite
• 1:28:15
  possibly on the sixth floor. Days before the Warrant Commission issued his report,
• 1:28:20
  someone apparently became concerned that the quote, cardboard cartons piled around the snipers window
• 1:28:27
  or to enclose it to ensure a seclusion, might have been too heavy to
• 1:28:31
  be moved by one man. Such a fact would, of course, indicate
• 1:28:35
  the presence of more than one man, suggesting your conspiracy. On September eleventh,
• 1:28:41
  nineteen sixty four, the FBI hastily interviewed the superintendent of the book depository
• 1:28:46
  and reported that none of the cartons around the window was too heavy to be
• 1:28:49
  handled by one man. The report also consisted statement that there were no cartons
• 1:28:55
  on the sixth floor which could not have been handled by one man. The
• 1:29:00
  sheet on the FBI report indicates that it is concerned with cardboard cartons. It
• 1:29:04
  seems certain as that the cardboard cartons are distinctly different and could not possibly confuse
• 1:29:10
  with a large, heavy wooden box such as the one described by Easterling,
• 1:29:15
  and also use to ship books to these school book depository. The most stunning
• 1:29:23
  evidence that wooden boxes such as those were at least in proximity to the sixth
• 1:29:28
  floor is found in a photograph taken on the fifth floor after the assassination.
• 1:29:32
  It appears in the Warren commissioned exhibits, but it is not published in the
• 1:29:38
  war And Report. The covers of the photograph to show the three men who
• 1:29:42
  were on the fifth floor at the time of the assassination and there at the
• 1:29:46
  edge of the photograph, or at least two of the wooden boxes apparently being
• 1:29:54
  used. Their storage bins are located right beside the stairwell, the only one
• 1:30:00
  eating down from the sixth floor. There are credible reports of a man believed
• 1:30:05
  to be a Cuban who was seen in Dealer Plaza just after the assassination.
• 1:30:11
  He was seen in a light colored car. There's even a photograph of a
• 1:30:15
  light colored ramble station wagon as it passes in front of the TSBD building.
• 1:30:19
  A police officer was sworn a sworn that he saw a man who looked like
• 1:30:24
  Oswald get into it. He watched as the car was driven away heading out
• 1:30:28
  of town. Robert Blakeley Blakey, chief Council of the Householict Committee, once
• 1:30:34
  told the author in a form of discussion that, based on his own studies,
• 1:30:40
  he theorizes that an assassin in addition to Oswald would have would be a
• 1:30:45
  Latin man between the ages of twenty five and thirty five from either Miami or
• 1:30:50
  New Orleans. There's no indication that Blakey knows anything about anybody named Manuel Rivera.
• 1:31:00
  The tase against Lee Harvey Oswald has always been circumstantial at best. No
• 1:31:03
  reliable witness has ever placed him in the assassin's lair. The FBI lab cannot
• 1:31:10
  find Oswald's fingerprints on the rifle. There is only the most tenuous evidence to
• 1:31:14
  indicate that Oswald ever took the manual liquor of Carclino into the building. Evidence
• 1:31:19
  there would be severely challenged in court. In the final analysis, it is
• 1:31:27
  not impossible to prove that the Easterling confession is true. However, it is
• 1:31:34
  possible to show that there is at least every reason for the FBI to investigate
• 1:31:42
  Easterling's leads vigorously. The evidence provided to the author by the FBI shows persuasively
• 1:31:48
  that a shocking indifference, even as sloppiness continues to mark the FBI's position on
• 1:31:54
  Eastering. It is also astonishing that the FBI's in social position is that Easterlingwald
• 1:32:00
  quote not in Dallas with Oswald's clone, as mister Easterling claims. This shows
• 1:32:05
  that the Bureau has never really listened to what Easterling is saying. Another example
• 1:32:13
  of this official indifference concerns Easterling's claim to have participated in the bombing of a
• 1:32:17
  commercial airliner on route to New Orleans from Tampa. No such bombing ever occurred,
• 1:32:24
  states the FBI. The bureau statement goes on to describe the crash of
• 1:32:28
  an airliner flying from Miami to New Orleans when the dating question, I'm playing
• 1:32:33
  that did crash and for which there is no certain eventual explanation. If the
• 1:32:40
  FBI had taken Easterling's allegations seriously, it would have investigated the case officially to
• 1:32:45
  learn that the flight it referred to from Miami to New Orleans made a stop
• 1:32:50
  in Tampa prior to the fatal crash that, according to Esterling, is where
• 1:32:56
  he helped place the explosives on board crash after the plane took off from Tampa.
• 1:33:01
  The point here is not whether Easterly really bombed the plane, but the
• 1:33:04
  FBI is not taking what he says with enough seriousness to even make the simplest
• 1:33:10
  investigation. During the months of his contact with this author, Robert Easterly lived
• 1:33:23
  with his elderly mother in a small home in the quiet countryside over All Springs,
• 1:33:27
  Mississippi. In the spring of the nineteen eighty three, he was jailed
• 1:33:32
  for drunk driving and hospitalized for various medical problems, including a heart attack,
• 1:33:39
  and then on July the thirty first, nineteen eighty three, Robert Easterly went
• 1:33:44
  berserk at his home. His mother fled in the house. Easterly terrorized his
• 1:33:48
  family by threatening to burn down the house for more than twelve hours, he
• 1:33:53
  systematically went through the house with a hammer, smashing every piece of glass,
• 1:34:00
  including dozens of family treasures. He used razors to slash the furniture. Well,
• 1:34:10
  you can't blow up the goddamn airplane and kill presents and all that.
• 1:34:14
  And when you get as close to dying as I am, hell, it
• 1:34:16
  worries. Yeah. And that, folks, is the story of Robert Easting.
• 1:34:27
  Now, thank you for following along. Make sure you're following along on
• 1:34:33
  Twitter and TikTok at the Lone gum And seven. The facebook page is the
• 1:34:40
  fourth the Lone gumb And Facebook page or podcast page on Facebook and on YouTube
• 1:34:47
  search for the Learned gum And podcast channel, and now has promised the eagerly
• 1:34:55
  awaited debut of the new song called Conspiracy A Shepherd on the Fire from my
• 1:35:03
  buddy, Roger. I'll give it to you, Roger, think it away,
• 1:35:09
  buddy from Dallas, Texas. They flash Apparently official President Kennedy died at
• 1:35:15
  one pm Central Standard time two o'clock Eastern Standard time, some thirty eight minutes
• 1:35:24
  ago. But now screen Don't Resist three, the lead Alive the Free worlds
• 1:36:15
  to probing the window that he was playing a chill, and everyone was talk
• 1:36:30
  around. She's a man. Don't believe for one that I tell you the
• 1:36:53
  read the life. Have to tell you the bigging that chair came getting him
• 1:37:09
  by waiting. All was over the tromper rup and begun the couple the thing
• 1:37:31
  I do with all and play my simple song. Don't be my one.
• 1:37:42
  Let me tell you be be the line of it. Down the big thing
• 1:38:05
  that you champain weight weight Ti situa to know my rain from men of him.
• 1:38:28
  We caught him head and he felt me down and back maint of his
• 1:38:31
  car. One was on him heading and the candy cried on on down on
• 1:39:02
  the biggest being that ultamk. Yeah, they ain't the way more. Oh
• 1:39:17
  I'm aware, Oh I get a hat as listen as to the mind