JFK King: The Dade County Links by Dan Christensen

              VOLUME I NUMBER 7 FEBRUARY 22, 1977
JFK, King:
The Dade County links
Is it mere coincidence that a Miami police informer was able to predict with
astonishing accuracy the assassinations of both John F. Kennedy
and Martin Luther King? Apparently, the FBI thought so
By Dan Christensen
©Copyright, 1976
Miami Magazine Inc.
Nov. 9, 1963 — Miami Police tape-record
a conversation in which an
extreme right-wing political orga­nizer
accurately predicts the assas­sination
of President John F. Ken­nedy
just as it was to happen 13 days
later. The man said the President
would be killed by shots fired "from
an office building with a high-pow­ered
rifle."
Jan. 13, 1964 — The same man,
using an alias, withdraws $12,000
from a savings account at a now de­funct
bank in Provo, Utah. The man,
who lived in Georgia, had opened
the account the previous July.
•
Nov. 1, 1963 — A Cuban exile walks
into the Parrot Jungle gift shop and
tells a female employe he hates
the President and he could "shoot
Kennedy between the eyes." He
has a "fi-iend named Lee," he says,
"who is also a sharp-shooter," and
that Lee spoke Russian and German
and was living in either Texas or
Mexico. (Lee Harvey Oswald spoke
Russian, lived in Texas, and earlier
in the fall had been traveling in
Mexico.)
•
These intriguing incidents suggest
the surreal atmosphere permeating
Miami in 1963. Not only were many
newly arrived Cuban refugees
making raids on their homeland in
attempts to overthrow the regime
of Fidel Castro, but America's home­grown
right-wing fanatics were
conducting a last-gasp effort to head
off the drive for equal rights by blacks.
For both, the prospects seemed
bleak, and for both, hatred focused on
John Fitzger£dd Kennedy.
To Cubans, Kennedy was the ulti­mate
betrayer. He had backed out of
supportive air strikes when a Cuban
exile brigade landed at the Bay of
Pigs, and he had knuckled under to
Nikita Khrushchev in 1962 when he
pledged not to invade Cuba in return
for removal of Soviet missiles from
the island. Kennedy had committed
himself and, as long as he lived, a
return to Cuba would be impossible.
On the right-wing fringe, Ken­nedy
was hated for other reasons,
mainly his stand on integration. He
was feared also as a leader who was
setting the United States up for
some nebulous takeover conspiracy
by the United Nations and the de­spised
Jews, extremist documents
show.
•
Miami Magazine's inquiry into
the assassination began with the
Miami Pohce tape-recording. Scat­tered
references have been made to
the recording since it was uncovered
in 1967, most notably by assassina­tion
researcher Harold Weisberg
who published the transcript in his
1970 book "Frame-Up." Investiga­tion
of this incident led to discovery
of the Parrot Jungle threat
Circuit Judge Seymour Gelber,
then an assistant to State Attorney
Richard Gerstein, provided nearly
all the initial information about the
tape-recording. Not only did he save
records and memoranda from the
investigation, he kept a diary. The
diary was invaluable in our research.
Gerstein too has been totally coop­erative.
Their investigation, which cul­minated
in the tape-recording of
Nov. 9, 1963, began in February 1962
after a series of local bombings, in­cluding
an attack upon the home of
Miami Herald editor Don Shoe­maker.
A few days after that bomb­ing,
Willie Somersett, a union orga­nizer
with extensive right-wing
political ties (he was a Klansman),
showed up at the Herald building to
offer his services as an informer.
Quickly, he began working for the
Miami police and the Federal
Bureau of Investigation. The police
were never advised of his ties to the
FBI. (Actually, he had worked for the
FBI, off and on, for about a decade, it
is now known). Over the next sev­eral
months, Somersett imparted
enough information to state investi­gators
to enable them to arrest and
convict several of the bombers.
After the bombing investigation,
Somersett remained on the payrolls
of both the city and the FBI, revealing
extremist activities. In April 1963 he
traveled to New Orleans for a meet-