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‘Suppressing the Truth in Dallas’ is Charles Brandt’s Account of the Kennedy Assassination
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Tuesday, September 27, 2022
 

STORY AND PHOTO BY KAREN BOSSICK

Charles Brandt was hoarse by 2 p.m. when he answered the knock on the door of his Hailey home.

His new book “Suppressing the Truth in Dallas: Conspiracy, Cover-Up and International Complications in the JFK Assassination Case,” had been released earlier that day. And he had been on the phone non-stop with reporters, including one from WABC Radio in New York City.

But he gained strength as he started to recount the story of how the book came to be. After all, this was a tale he had wanted to tell ever since that afternoon in the 1990s when Jimmy Hoffa’s 6-foot-4, 220-pound bodyguard had turned white at the mention of Lee Harvey Oswald.

“I don’t want to go near Dallas, ever,” the man who confessed to having killed Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa told Brandt.

“Frank Sheeran was telling me how the Mafia got rid of witnesses by murdering them in Sicily,” said Brandt, a former homicide investigator, prosecutor and chief deputy attorney general of Delaware. “And I said, ‘You mean like Lee Harvey Oswald?’ Frank turned white, his hands shaking, and I knew from my interrogation experience that he knew something. Then he told me how he’d been ordered to carry three rifles in a duffel bag to Baltimore where they were sent to Dallas just before the assassination of John F. Kennedy.”

Brandt and his new book will be front and center at Chapter One Bookstore’s Book Signing Party from 6 to 8 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 29, at the Limelight Hotel. Brandt plans to offer a few remarks and refreshments will be served.

Brandt met Sheeran when the then-70-year-old hit man who had killed mobster Joey Gallo, asked his help with legal issues involving a surgery he needed. Sheeran, who was released from prison in 1993 after serving 13 years of a 32-year sentence for labor racketeering, told Brand he’d read Brandt’s book, “The Right to Remain Silent,” based on his experiences as a homicide investigator.

It was a book that had prompted President Ronald Reagan to send Brandt an unsolicited blurb. And Sheeran said he liked it, too—so much so that he wanted to make his confession to Brandt. The son of a man who had studied for the priesthood, Sheeran wanted to be buried in a Catholic cemetery.

“Confession is a basic human need like food and shelter. But when people like him say they want to confess, they really want you to pull it out of them,” Brandt noted.

Brandt had his initial interview with Sheeran in 1991, but Brandt had to wait another eight years to get the entire story since Sheeran was hesitant to reveal some things while those he was talking about were still alive.

“I Heard You paint Houses”—the result of those interviews--has been described one of the best accounts of the disappearance of Hoffa, with former New York Medical Examiner Michael Baden saying he was convinced that the Hoffa mystery had at long last been solved. It laid the groundwork for the movie “The Irishman,” starring Robert De Niro and Al Pacino.

And it paved away for Brandt’s eventual talks with Sheeran regarding Kennedy’s assassination.

“I can talk with guys like Sheeran because I’m Italian,” said Brandt.

Brandt was a junior high English teacher sitting in a teachers lounge in Queens, N.Y., when a social studies teacher reported that Kennedy had just been shot. He watched the non-stop coverage on a 17-inch TV set at his mother’s house in Queens over the next few days.

“They kept showing Lee Harvey Oswald and I said to my mother, ‘Look at this, Mom, they keep parading this guy around. Someone’s going to shoot this guy.”

The words were barely out of his mouth when Jack Ruby did shoot Oswald.

“He claimed he killed Oswald because he felt bad for JFK’s widow,” Brandt said. “But, as a guy who grew up on the streets of New York, I knew that the only time a guy like Jack Ruby would be concerned about a widow is when they’re trying to squeeze a buck out of someone. Right away everyone knew something was up, primarily from the lies Ruby started pumping out. I got 15 Pinocchios from Ruby. And Dallas was to become the only intentionally unsolved homicide I had ever seen.”

With Sheeran’s confession, Brandt began to study the Warren Commission Report and other material involving the assassination with the critical skills he had learned interrogating 56 homicides in the 1970s, during which he put men four men on Death Row.

“Congress did a blue-ribbon panel after the Warren Commission Report came out, but it was fixed, he said. “None of this would have happened but for Bobby Kennedy’s diligence going after the Mafia. But for the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Mafia might never have gone after JFK.”

Brandt said his Italian background served him well in investigating homicides, as did his experience as a forklift operator at the Chrysler plant in Delaware, a school teacher and a welfare investigator in East Harlem.

“The attorney general who hired me said I was the perfect person,” he recounted. He said, ‘You bring life’s experience to these cases. You’re not just a kid out of law school.”

Indeed, Brandt’s analytic skills and diligence showing up at every crime scene earned the respect of his colleagues, who named him one of the best lawyers in America, and the police—some who still call him to pick his brain on a case.

His new book purports to solve the triple homicide of Kennedy, Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippet and Lee Harvey Oswald, as well as the coverup to protect his friends by Warren Commission Chairman and Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, who Brandt notes was a driving force behind the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

“Warren covered up the existence of two crucial eyewitnesses—Earlene Roberts, a housekeeper who told of seeing two Dallas police officers summoning Oswald for his getaway, and Dallas reporter Victor Robertson, who witnessed Jack Ruby making an early attempt to kill Oswald while he was being interrogated.”

It was a police sergeant and Mafia associate who allowed Ruby into the secured basement of the Dallas Police department where Ruby killed Oswald, he added.

Robert Kennedy, meanwhile, disbanded the Department of Justice’s Organized Crime Division for fear that he might be implicated in plots to assassinate Fidel Castro. He even withheld wiretap evidence from the Warren commission, Brandt said.

“I felt such a tremendous relief when the book came out today. Some of the reviewers have told me they talked to experts who said this is the real deal,” he said. “If I can get the kind of validation for this book I got from Ronald Regan for my earlier book, that’s what all cops want. They don’t want to be wrong about the people they arrest.”

DID YOU KNOW?

In addition to “The Right to Remain Silent” and “I Heard You Paint Houses,” Charles Brandt has written

  • “Unfinished Business,” the story of FBI undercover agent Joe Pistone, who infiltrated the Mob during the 1970s. That story was the subject of the movie “Donny Brasco” starring Al Pacino and Johnny Depp.
  • “We’re Going to Win This Thing,” about FBI agent Lin DeVecchio, who was falsely accused of ordering four mob hits.

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