From jmcadams Sun Jul 21 10:15:23 PDT 1996 Article: 1356 of alt.conspiracy.jfk.moderated Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy.jfk.moderated Path: netcom.com!jmcadams From: STEVE4439@delphi.com Subject: LaFontaines & Odio Part 1 Status: O Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; CHARSET=US-ASCII Message-ID: <01I6T098MK7S8YEKSM@delphi.com> Sender: jmcadams@netcom19.netcom.com Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT Organization: NETCOM On-line Communication Services (408 261-4700 guest) Mime-Version: 1.0 Date: Mon, 8 Jul 1996 02:10:32 GMT Approved: jmcadams@netcom.com Lines: 286 UNDERSTANDING SILVIA ODIO: WHAT THE LA FONTAINES DON'T TELL YOU By: Steve N. Bochan In their long awaited book, OSWALD TALKED, Ray and Mary La Fontaine devote an entire chapter to Silvia Odio. Unfortunately, there is so much that is misleading and erroneous about their treatment of Odio, it makes one wonder if the rest of the book is as egregiously inaccurate. The only other book that I can recall in a similar vein was CASE CLOSED. Both books made me angry enough to hurl them once or twice across the room because I knew that the author(s) knew better than what passed for their honest appraisal of the evidence. But in this instance, the disappointment matched the level of my anger and stung me: I thought the La Fontaines were good journalists! I loved their piece titled, "The Fourth Tramp" on the Elrod matter that appeared in The Washington Post two summers ago. (1) It was original, and it seemed to be backed by startling new evidence. How could they have gone so wrong then on Silvia Odio, when so much of the official source documentation was readily available to them? Was journalistic integrity displaced by sensationalism, all in an effort to sell a new book on the assassination by adding a new twist to old evidence? Rather than dissect the various and sundry errors in the chapter, point-by-point, I will deal with the first one which also happens to be the linchpin of their entire theory on Odio and, unfortunately for the La Fontaines, is so intolerable that it destroys the remainder of their convoluted fantasy regarding Silvia Odio and the assassination. They need to go back to the drawing board - or at least review the primary source documents - and do some serious research on Silvia Odio, lest they be accused of malicious rumor mongering. They might even try interviewing her in person, but after the way they treated her in the book, I doubt that this living witness (a member of a group where membership is declining with each passing year) will be very cooperative with any future endeavor to shed more light on the JFK assassination. Let's start at the beginning . . . When I saw that Silvia Odio had rated an entire chapter (Chapter 9, "It Takes a Woman to Know") in OSWALD TALKED, I eagerly turned to that chapter. But my heart sank quickly when I read the first sentence: How do we know that Oswald attended anti-Castro meetings in Dallas during the fall of 1963? "How do we know" is right. I didn't know that we did know! Where is the evidence for this? In all the years since the assassination, whenever this erroneous story about Oswald (and Odio) attending anti-Castro meetings surfaces, no one has ever come forward to substantiate it with any witnesses who had seen them at these alleged meetings, or any other type of corroborative evidence that any such meetings ever occurred with Oswald and Odio present. That is, however, until the La Fontaines offered their "new evidence" that Oswald attended such meetings by repeating this uncorroborated (and untrue) story and then, amazingly, claimed that it was Silvia Odio who told this lie. They continue: Well, a female witness - termed "credible" even by J. Lee Rankin, general counsel of the Warren Commission - let the matter out more than three decades ago. Remarkably, no one has appeared to notice as yet, possibly blinded by the klieg lights of her other, more sensational, assertions. To this day, the latter have comprised an important structural prop for conspiracy arguments, and continue to generate enthusiastic assessments of the witness's reliability. Anthony Summers has called her claims "the strongest human evidence" [of a conspiracy], HSCA investigator Gaeton Fonzi remains "absolutely convinced" she was telling the truth, and -no!- the angelic Sylvia Meagher, mistress of reason and noblest spirit ever to examine the Kennedy conundrum, titled the exposition of her tale "the proof of the plot." But with both new and overlooked information at hand, the flashy old tale suddenly looks very much like an invention, proving only that even the Divine may (though very seldom) err, like mere human scribblers. It is important to note that Rankin considered Odio a credible witness - that is true - as did Wesley Liebeler late in the summer of 1964, when he warned Rankin that: There are problems. Odio may well be right. The Commission will look bad if it turns out that she is. There is no need to look foolish by grasping at straws to avoid admitting that there is a problem. (2) However, it needs to be emphasized that it is absolutely untrue that Silvia Odio told anyone that she knew Oswald because he attended several anti-Castro meetings. The fact is that "credible" Silvia has always denied ever saying this. (3) The La Fontaines have created a straw man by bringing it up, and then they make it worse by accusing her of making it up. The two people the La Fontaines try to use to corroborate this outrageous tale, always denied by Odio, do exactly the opposite: they refute it - although you won't read that in the Odio chapter in OSWALD TALKED. (In fact, after reading Chapter 9, you might feel a more appropriate title for the book might have been "SILVIA TALKED.") Nevertheless, the simple truth is that Dr. Burton Einspruch, her psychiatrist, and her jealous ex-best friend Lucille Connell help destroy the tale that Silvia is alleged to have told, and this is where the confusion begins for some. As most students of the JFK assassination know, Odio has always denied ever saying that she knew Oswald from several anti-Castro meetings in Dallas. She denied telling her ex-best friend Lucille Connell this, and she denied telling her psychiatrist Dr. Burton Einspruch this. Additionally, the evidence on record from these two supports the fact that Silvia Odio never said this, to wit: 1). Lucille Connell did not recall Odio telling this tale of Oswald and Odio at several anti-Castro meetings to the FBI when interviewed by Gaeton Fonzi in 1976. In fact when asked if Silvia Odio had told her that she had heard Oswald speak at a meeting, Connell replied, "I really don't recall her telling me that. I just recall that Oswald came to her apartment and wanted to get her involved in some way." (4) 2). While under oath and answering a question about the Oswald visit to Odio's apartment, Dr. Einspruch expresses his doubt that Odio really saw the person we know as Lee Harvey Oswald, based on her ONE TIME experience at her apartment: EINSPRUCH: No. I don't think it was something she had just casually fabricated. But I retained just my own, you know, personal doubt, like I would even at this moment, that a mistake could have been made with a one time kind of experience that she had with him [Oswald] under those circumstances. Now, if she had said that she had seen him a couple of times, then I would feel stronger about it. (5) Dr. Einspruch, under oath, suggests that IF Odio had seen Oswald "a couple of times" then he would feel stronger about her ability to identify Oswald at her apartment. Doesn't this testimony, under oath, coming from someone who probably knew Odio better than anyone else, demolish any notion that Odio saw Oswald at any other time, let alone at anti-Castro rallies where presumably other witnesses could have also seen them there? Why would Dr. Einspruch, under oath, say such a thing (that Odio had only seen Oswald once) if he believed she had seen Oswald previously at several anti-Castro meetings in Dallas? Instead of using all of this evidence which is on the record and available to the public at the National Archives II at College Park, Maryland, the La Fontaines chose to selectively excerpt from a memo written by WC investigator Griffin on 4/16/64. In that memo, he asserts that Einspruch related a story of Odio seeing "Oswald at more than one anti-Castro Cuban meeting." This might be interesting except for two things which are immediately apparent from reading the entire memo in context: 1) the memo never quotes Dr. Einspruch directly and, 2) it is obvious that either Einspruch or Griffin (or both) are confusing these alleged meetings, with the "one time kind of experience" at Silvia's house with her sister Annie present. How could this be? Two things come to mind. First, had the La Fontaines not relied exclusively on only the weakest evidence that, when taken alone, *appears* to support their erroneous theory that Odio is a liar, they would have realized that the two people Griffin claims told him about Silvia seeing Oswald at the alleged anti-Castro meetings, both later either denied saying or negated the notion entirely as noted above. The 4/16/64 Griffin memo is all secondhand information that never quotes Dr. Einspruch directly. Instead, Griffin paraphrases constantly and worse, he seems confused and "infers" what he thinks his witness really means rather than following-up with a direct question to the witness (Einspruch). In fact, on the very issue of the alleged anti-Castro meetings and a remark about the term "inflammatory" made by Dr. Einspruch, Griffin opines that: "The term 'inflammatory' is Dr. Einspruch's and he could not clearly indicate what it was that Oswald had said. In fact, I got the impression these comments were pro-Castro." (6) In other words, WC attorney Griffin is now actually interpreting things rather than simply quoting directly from his witness, and he fails to discuss what it was that gave him "the impression these comments were pro-Castro." (What comments? Einspruch couldn't "clearly indicate what it was that Oswald said.") Second, and perhaps more importantly, the La Fontaines describe Griffin as one of the WC attorneys who was left out of the loop and not informed on matters such as Jack Ruby. (7) If that is true, then it would follow to ask why the La Fontaines would use a document from someone whom they claim was uninformed, to support their theory that Odio said she knew Oswald from anti-Castro meetings? (It is true they say that Griffin was uninformed on Ruby, but Ruby is part of the Silvia Odio matter as we will see in a moment.) Parenthetically, in the same paragraph they discuss Griffin, the La Fontaines write that Leon D. Hubert, another WC attorney, resigned from the WC investigation "in frustration." Hubert and Griffin were the two attorneys who were aggressively looking into Ruby's past and apparently were being kept in the dark about many things. The problem is, after reading the La Fontaine book, you never find out just how much in the dark they really were, or how much in the dark the La Fontaines really are about the Silvia Odio incident. ****** In order to understand how Odio came to the FBI's attention in the first place and how the reported actions of Jack Ruby led them, albeit circuitously, to her, we have to examine the statements of Silvia Odio's ex-best friend, Lucille Connell. >From Gaeton Fonzi's April 5, 1976 memo to Dave Marston, the following: Connell says that she was speaking on the telephone with a friend of hers who was secretary in a law office when Oswald was shot. "We both had our television on," she recalls, "and saw Ruby shoot Oswald. And she said to me, "Oh my goodness, Ruby was in our office last week and had power of attorney drawn for his sister." (8) Connell was speaking to her friend, Mrs. Sanford Pick, who worked for attorney Graham R.E. Koch in Dallas. (9) The La Fontaines reference Koch on page 216 in another chapter titled, "You Don't Know Me" and unfortunately miss the connection to Odio, although they do understand the significance of Ruby wanting to set up the power of attorney. However, they write (as does Seth Kantor in his book) that the power of attorney was to be with his attorney Koch - not his sister: Ruby's chief concern now would be in making the [Oswald] shooting look a spur-of-the-moment matter so he could be back out in the street as soon as possible and reap the rewards of being a popular hero. He already had the perfect reason for being in the same block as the police station by going on a legitimate errand to the Western Union office there [to wire the money to Little Lynn]. Next he would need a reason for the gun. He stuffed nine $100 bills, 30 $10 bills, 40 $20 bills and a number of smaller bills into a pocket. It was supposed to be the federal excise tax money Ruby owed. By carrying it with him, he created an understandable reason under Texas law to pack the gun, too, even though he had no license to carry any hidden weapon. But the excise tax payment story is phony. Only five days earlier he had signed the power-of-attorney in the office of his tax lawyer, Gragham Koch, granting Koch the right to negotiate with the IRS for an extended time period to make those federal tax payments. There is no logical reason for Ruby to be carrying all that money, except to establish an alibi. The La Fontaines use Seth Kantor for this information but, ironically, even though they had spoken with Fonzi over the past few years before writing their book, no mention is made of how this part of Ruby's story led the FBI to Silvia Odio. (10) In fact, the La Fontaines, in describing the deteriorated friendship between Odio and Connell after the assassination, erroneously state that: Lucille Connell called the FBI on the heels of her conversation with Silvia. (pp. 257) This is completely misleading. It was the FBI that called Connell - not the other way around - and it was after they spoke with Connell, and Connell eventually bringing up the Oswald visit to Odio's apartment, that Odio entered the picture. [Continued in Part 2]