Santos Trafficante - It Should Have Been Bobby

Santos Trafficante was a Tampa-based crime boss who was among those who lost out on gambling revenues when Castro took power in Cuba, and Trafficante was jailed there and eventually deported. He subsequently became involved in the CIA-Mafia plots to assassinate Castro, along with Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana.

Trafficante is believed to be responsible for the murder of rival Albert Anastasia in 1957. When Johnny Roselli was brutally murdered in 1975 during the time of his Church Committee appearances, Trafficante was suspected by some.

Anti-Castro exile Jose Aleman told HSCA investigators that in late 1962, Trafficante had told him that Kennedy would not be re-elected, because "he is going to be hit." Aleman believed that from the context of the conversation, Trafficante meant that the "hit" would come from Jimmy Hoffa.

In the early 1990s', Frank Ragano told journalists a story, repeated in his book Mob Lawyer, that Ragano had taken a message from Hoffa to Trafficante and Carlos Marcello to carry out the murder of the President. Ragano wrote that in 1987 a seriously-ill Trafficante told him that he and Marcello had carried out the other, but that he had misgivings - "I think Carlos f**ked up in getting rid of Giovanni (John) -- maybe it should have been Bobby."

While some including HSCA Chief Counsel Robert Blakey find Ragano's account persuasive, others do not. Ragano was contacted by the Assassination Records Review Board to see if his sole-sourced story could be corroborated. He produced handwritten notes regarding the assassination referred to in his book as contemporaneous, but as the Review Board wrote "he could not definitively state whether he took them during the meetings of the 1960s or later when he was working on his book in the 1990s." Secret Service tests did not settle the matter.