There are two big historical questions; history raises lots of questions actually, but there are two that, in the last decades, people ask all the time. Where were you at 12:30 p.m (Central Standard Time) on Friday, November 22, 1963, the day John Fitzgerald Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was assassinated? And where were you on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, when a series of four coordinated terrorist attacks planned by the Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda stroke New York City and  Washington D.C.?


Everybody has an answer, their own personal one, because willing or not, we have lived through a significant historical moment. “When JFK was assassinated, I was in Italy,” Yale Professor Joseph LaPalombara said as he introduced Stefano Vaccara's book Carlos Marcello, The Man Behind the JFK Assassination, “A fellow professor called me on the phone to inform me. The media canceled all programming and only played classical music. They left us to deal with our shock, a shock that was affecting the whole world.”


After the initial disbelief, Professor LaPalombara became one of many, one of the thousands of people who believed, after a ten-month investigation that went from November 1963 to September 1964 led by the Warren Commission, that the President was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald, a former U.S. Marine who defected to the Soviet Union in October 1959 and returned to the US in 1962, and that he was acting alone. “But I changed point of view after reading Stefano Vaccara's book, because it points you in the right direction, that of the truth.”


“This country was not told the truth,” Sicilian born journalist and director of the online magazine La Voce di New York, Stefano Vaccara said at that same book presentation organized at Casa Italiana Zerilli Marimo, “Although in 1978, in contrast to the conclusions of the Warren Commission, the HSCA (the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations) declared that Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy, nothing was done. The HSCA found the original FBI investigation and the Warren Commission Report to be seriously flawed but the media did not do anything to spread the truth, they left America in the dark. Why?”


Vaccara's book raises a lot of thought provoking questions, some answers are provided, some are not. First and foremost, who was Carlos Marcello? “The real mafioso is the guys whose name you don't know,” Vaccara explained, “and he is the one who's responsible for the assassination of Kennedy. Mine is not a scoop, but just the confirmation of a suspicion I've always had and the result of a simple internet research.” Indeed, every semester, Vaccara assigns an investigative paper on the JFK assassination and 90% of the times his students come up with the same answer: boss Carlos Marcello was the real culprit.


Marcello, born Calogero Minacori, was a Sicilian-American mafioso who became the big boss of New Orleans organized crime during the 1940s and held this position for the next 30 years. In 1959, Marcello appeared before a US Senate committee investigating the illegal activities of the mafia and other crime organizations throughout the country. Serving as Chief Counsel to the committee was Robert F. Kennedy, while his brother, future US President, Senator John F. Kennedy, was a member of the committee. When questioned, Marcello invoked the Fifth Amendment  and refused to answer any questions relating to his background, activities and associates. When John F. Kennedy became President in 1961, Robert Kennedy, who was still fighting hard against organized crime, was nominated Attorney General and Marcello was deported to Guatemala, with a bogus excuse linked to his immigration status, where he planned his revenge. His search for a fall guy lead him to Lee Harvey Oswald. “In its investigation, the HSCA noted the presence of credible associations relating both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby, the man who shot and killed Oswald two day after the Kennedy's assassination, to figures having a relationship, albeit tenuous, with Marcello's crime family or organization. “Their report stated: "The committee found that Marcello had the motive, means and opportunity to have President John F. Kennedy assassinated, though it was unable to establish direct evidence of Marcello's complicity.” (Wikipedia)


According to Vaccara there are two more ingredients that complete the “guilty” picture “Blackmailing and alienation from establishment, and at the time of his death, almost every institution of power was against JFK.” So this leads to more questions... “Did Marcello act alone?” and “Why the cover up?”


Vaccara is looking for more answers, meanwhile he will be busy writing a new chapter for a new edition of the book: a chapter on Ruby.