Patsy

In the early 1960’s, gun running was a profitable business.  From Miami to Mexico, this involved organized crime, latin-american revolutionaries, a man in Dallas named Jack Ruby, and a New Orleans man named Lee Harvey Oswald.

In records released in 1989 by the Dallas police department, Mary Le Fontaine, a local reporter, discovered that a man had been jailed next to Oswald on November 22, 1963.  He was picked up in a sweep following the shootings, was released after Oswald was murdered, and then disappeared. In 1964, he surfaced at an FBI office in Tennesee to give “information about the murder of JFK”.  He told that while jailed near Oswald, he witnessed the police bring before Oswald a badly injured man and ask Oswald if this was the man he had seen at a recent motel meeting. At this meeting, money had changed hands, and one Jack Ruby also present. Oswald said ‘yes’.

After arrest, a note was found in Oswald’s personal notebook:

Oct Nov 1,1963

FBI agent (R1-11211)

James P. Hosty

MU 8605

1114 commerce St

Note the license number. Oswald was meeting Dallas FBI agent Hosty in his car, in the months preceding the assassination. Hosty was in charge of militant extremist groups, gun running, and domestic counterintelligence.

Following meetings with Hosty, Oswald took significant actions, like in March 1963, when he opened a post office box, and promptly bought, via mail order, the famous Mannlicher-Carcano rifle from Klein’s Sporting Goods.  At that very time, the mail order gun business – and specifically Klein’s Sporting Goods – was under investigation by Congress. Hearings were about to begin.

Oswald spent the 1963 summer in New Orleans, working with anti-Castro groups, but also publicly posing as pro-Castro. He was exposed – on TV – as a visitor to the Soviet Union who had renounced his US Citizenship.  This served to help discredit the Castro cause. Oswald seems willing to have helped this happen. Around this time, the FBI successfully raided and confiscated an anti-Castro weapons cache at Pontchartrain.

Early in November, Oswald visited the Dallas FBI office, but Hosty was not there.  Oswald left a note. After the assassination, FBI headquarters in Washington ordered this note destroyed. A few days later, in Dallas, a gun deal was foiled by agents.  A man was badly injured in a getaway car – the man brought before Oswald in his cell?

A sincere Marxist, but an FBI informant?  With his tenuous status, trying to find and keep a job, Oswald may have been willing to help the FBI, and infiltrate anti-Castro groups. He did by all accounts believe in Castro. He may have discovered an assassination plot. He may have warned the FBI.

After the motorcade passed, he calmly left the Texas School Book Depository. He may only  then have learned that the assassination had not been thwarted. He went home and got his gun.

He may have known that decoy policemen would be involved.  He killed the first policeman that tried to stop him, unconcerned about eye witnesses. He may have thought he would be safe in custody.

“I’m a patsy.“