December 20, 1973
Everyone who was old enough to understand the news at the time remembers the day that President John F. Kennedy was killed. It was like the moon landing, or the murder of John Lennon—an event that effectively stopped time for just a moment and seized the public consciousness.
Conspiracy theories galore exist around this event, but let’s concentrate on only one of them—the involvement of the Mafia, and more specifically of Richard Cain, in the assassination of the president.
Cain (aka Richard Scalzetti) had been the mob’s mole in the Chicago Police Department and with his espionage experience he assisted the Mafia in its plan with the CIA to bring down Cuban president Fidel Castro. Cain was of superior intelligence, spoke five languages and worked on training Cuban exiles for the Bay of Pigs Invasion. He was also said to be a crack marksman. All of these statements, save the latter, are verifiable facts.
Further, the bespectacled and innocuous-looking Cain had an extremely tight relationship with Mafia Don Sam Giancana himself. It has even been posited that Giancana was Cain’s biological father. In short, Cain had the contacts, the know-how and the abilities to make him invaluable to the mob for this particular job.
So what was Cain’s role in the death of the president? Well, the claim, supposedly from the mouth of Sam Giancana himself, was that Lee Harvey Oswald was not alone on that terrible day in 1963. Apparently Cain was there with him. What’s more, it was actually Cain who fired the bullet that ended Kennedy’s life, and not Oswald. The mob’s motive in the killing, of course, was to halt the Senate’s investigation into Mafia operations. In other words, the mob wanted to get the government off its back.
Ten years after the assassination, the Mafia decided they could do without Cain’s services, and had him eliminated too. Shortly before he died, Cain apparently contacted FBI agent William F. Roemer and began to supply him with information regarding gambling operations in Chicago. It was Cain’s plan to use Roemer in order to remove powerful gambling rivals and therefore take over the city’s gambling scene himself. It was a typical Cain move, trying to play both sides.
If Cain was working with Roemer, there would be nothing to stop him from relaying everything he knew about the Mafia’s involvement in the Castro Project (as the assassination attempt against the Cuban leader was termed) and the murder of President Kennedy. There was no way the mob could let Cain live.
Cain was murdered inside Rose’s Sandwich Shop in Chicago on December 20, 1973. That day masked gunmen entered the restaurant and forced everyone present up against the wall; then, asking where the package was, shot Cain—and only Cain—through the head several times before exiting. Supposedly before the killers left they took something from Cain’s pocket, but what the item was no one can say. Possibly that move was only a ruse; we’ll never know, because Cain’s killers have never been identified. Sam Giancana was reportedly suitably upset when he heard about the murder of Richard Cain. It would have gone badly for the killers if he had ever caught up with them, whoever they may have been.