Chapter Nineteen
1 Juan Romero died of a heart attack in 2018 at the age of sixty-eight. A twenty-four-year-old Palestinian immigrant named Sirhan Sirhan was convicted of murdering Robert Kennedy and is serving a life sentence at the Richard Donovan Correctional Facility in California. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Bill O’Reilly in an interview that the Kennedy family believes that Sirhan did shoot his father but likely had help. RFK Jr. stated: “Because an eight-chamber revolver cannot fire nine shots, much less thirteen, we know that a second gunman must have been firing in the Ambassador Hotel party on the night my father died.” However, an FBI investigation into the assassination could produce no compelling evidence that another person was involved. It is worth noting that J. Edgar Hoover oversaw the investigation.
2 In an extraordinary departure from this policy, hit man Gregory “the Grim Reaper” Scarpa of the Colombo crime family was approached by the FBI in 1964 about helping find missing civil rights workers James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwermer in Mississippi. J. Edgar Hoover was under media pressure to locate the graves of the three individuals, who were thought to have been murdered. After the FBI’s legal methods failed, Scarpa was secretly paid $5,000 to do the job. He was already connected to the FBI as a sometime informant. After flying to Mississippi, Scarpa located a known member of the Ku Klux Klan, forced a gun barrel down his throat, and demanded to know the location of the bodies. The terrified Klansman immediately told Scarpa the precise burial spot.