Robert F. Kennedy the younger is a mixed bag. His co-existence with the corrupt Trump organization is an embarrassment to his distinguished family name. On the other hand, he is admired for a career of environmental work, but the jury is decidedly locked when it comes to some of his current very outspoken positions on public health. Many, including some medical people, think he may have a point about vaccines, especially the batteries given to the very young, but think he has taken the cause to dangerous extremes. But there is another topic on which we think he deserves unanimous applause. Two weeks ago, marking the 61st anniversary of the murder of his uncle, President John F. Kennedy, he said he could convince any jury in the country that the CIA was responsible for the crime. He said all the key players traced to South Florida and the Cuban community's intimate involvement with the CIA. He was right on.

If longtime readers of Gold Coast Magazine, and later this blog, think they have heard this story before, they sure have. Since the 1970s, we have been compelled to react every time we hear prominent figures say that there are so many conspiratorial theories that we will never know for sure what happened. And occasionally, but less often than in the past, we read that Lee Harvey Oswald is the accepted killer. The more thoughtful accounts of this profound tragedy usually trace events from the day of the assassination through the Warren Commission, which pinned the blame solely on Oswald, and up through the government committees in the 1970s which concluded that there was a conspiracy but left the public to pick its own favorite killer organization.

That's where we came in and why today we feel a moral duty to engage whenever important commentators such as Robert Kennedy reawaken the public interest. Gaeton Fonzi was a partner in Gold Coast Magazine, so we are among the very few people still standing who had an inside view of Fonzi's 1970s investigations and know the story behind the story the government never fully told. Actually, it was told first in the pages of Gold Coast in 1980, and we will get to that.

Gaeton Fonzi in the 1970s. 

Gaeton Fonzi, and almost all the principal figures in his story, have passed. But his work likely influenced Robert Kennedy. Fonzi was one of the first to seriously challenge the Warren Report in the mid-60s. He interviewed Arlen Specter, later a U.S. senator, the man who came up with the "magic bullet" theory needed to explain how Oswald could have acted alone. Fonzi was shocked that Specter could not explain his own theory. Fonzi's piece in Philadelphia magazine, where we both worked at the time, was read by Pennsylvania Senator Richard Schweiker, who a decade later reopened the investigation in the Church Committee, which evolved into the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Schweiker was convinced Oswald was an intelligence operative set up to take the blame. Fonzi was by then in South Florida with Gold Coast, exactly where Schweiker wanted him to probe the CIA connections to the anti-Castro Cubans in Miami.

Fonzi did just that, finding a leader of the anti-Castro movement who inadvertently told Fonzi he had seen Oswald with his CIA handler in Dallas not long before the assassination. After considerable work, Fonzi learned the CIA man was a high-ranking figure who coordinated the anti-Castro effort in Miami. At that point, Fonzi sensed the CIA attempting to sabotage his work, just as it had the Warren Commission years before. The man who headed the probe, a brilliant Philadelphia prosecutor named Richard Sprague, was forced out when he refused to sign a secrecy agreement with the CIA. His successor was a well-meaning organized crime specialist who could not believe the CIA was involved. He directed the investigation toward the Mafia. Fonzi met some interesting mobsters, but it was largely a waste of his time, just as were various bogus tips Fonzi got from people who turned out to be CIA contacts.

David Atlee Phillips was the CIA man Fonzi linked to Lee Harvey Oswald. He unsuccessfully sued Fonzi and the Washingtonian magazine. 

The bottom line was that the final report of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, largely written by Fonzi under pressure, did not give his CIA work adequate weight, and hinted that the mob was involved. In short, inconclusive. Disgusted, Fonzi wrote his own version  - long articles that first ran in our magazine and the influential Washingtonian magazine. Fonzi spent the next decade expanding his research and finding other sources linking Oswald to the CIA. In 1991, he published "The Last Investigation." It was praised by JFK researchers but generally ignored by major media. Over the years, however, it has grown in stature. Today, it's cited as a landmark work. When Gaeton Fonzi died in 2012, the New York Times ran a featured obit and said the book was among the best of the hundreds written on the assassination. And anybody who read it knows the CIA was involved in both the murder and the years of elaborate cover-ups.

"The Last Investigation" has seen several printings.

On both Fonzi investigations, the Warren Commission in the 1960s and the reopened investigation in the 70s, we watched over the man's shoulder. In fact, much of his work on the Florida project took place in our magazine office. We met most of the people working with him and they all suspected the CIA. We couldn't help but become something of an authority on the authority. Fonzi is not around to endorse Robert Kennedy's very strong indictment of the CIA, so we will do it in his memory.