An infamous five

At least five people - four men and a woman - carried out the conspiracy to kill Robert Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel. Lisa Pease has recorded the impressions of two witnesses who saw four people standing with Sirhan. Roy Mills, she writes, 'observed a group of five people, one of which was female, standing outside the Embassy Room as Kennedy was speaking. He claimed that Sirhan was one of the four males in the group, remembering him distinctly for his baggy pants. He thought one of the other men was a hotel employee.' Another witness, Darnell Johnson, who was in the pantry when the shooting took place, saw the group make an inconspicuous exit while all eyes were on Sirhan. He told the police that 'While I was waiting [for Kennedy], I saw four guys and a girl about halfway between Kennedy and where I was standing. The girl had a white dress with black polka dots. During the time that a lady yelled, "Oh, my God," they walked out. All except the one - this is the guy they grabbed [Sirhan]. The others that walked out seemed unconcerned at the events which were taking place.' (NOTE 1)

A number of witnesses have left descriptions of the three males in the group. A police report made just before 12.30 am furnished the description of 'male Caucasian, 20 to 22, 6' to 6'2", built thin - blond curly hair, wearing brown pants and a light brown shirt.' This was almost certainly the man glimpsed earlier in the evening by Irene Gizzi. She told the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) that the man she had seen with the polka dot girl around 9 pm was a 'male, possible Latin, dark sun bleached hair gold colored shirt, and possible light colored pants, possibly jeans.' Gizzi's friend Katherine Keir and another witness, Jeanette Prudhomme, also saw a man in a gold coloured shirt. Allowing for confusion regarding clothing, this must have been the 'boy' in a white shirt and gold sweater seen following the aforementioned female down the fire stairs of the Ambassador Hotel by RFK campaign worker Sandy Serrano. The source of the police description was Sergeant Paul Schraga who obtained it, just minutes after the assassination, from the Bernsteins, an elderly Jewish couple he encountered in the hotel carpark. It seems that the tall young man in the gold shirt and his female companion in the polka dot dress had run headlong into the Bernsteins in their indecent haste to vacate the scene.

Earlier in the evening, Serrano had seen the tall young man and the polka dot girl together with a very short man with bushy dark hair. This was presumably the man referred to in a 12.34 am police radio report. In the broadcast, mention was made of 'a male Latin, 25-26, 5-5, bushy hair, dark eyes, light build, wearing a blue jacket and blue levis and blue tennis shoes.' What is striking about this description is that the man resembles Sirhan himself, although Sirhan was already in custody. Indeed, one eyewitness thought the man could have been Sirhan's brother, while the man's choice of co-ordinated blue clothing was obviously intended to echo Sirhan's own. No American conspiracy, it would seem, is complete without the presence of a double, a figure whose presence seems intended to confuse witnesses about exactly who and what they saw. It is possible, moreover, that some persons who, on earlier occasions, thought they had seen Sirhan had actually seen an impersonator. (NOTE 2)

Of Sirhan's co-conspirators, at least one also fired shots at Kennedy. Indeed, the man who was observed rushing away from the crime scene with a pistol partly concealed under a newspaper seems to have fired the first shots and is most certainly Kennedy's real assassin. For few if any of Sirhan's shots actually hit Kennedy, and those that did hit him apparently did not injure him seriously. (In fact, he may have been shooting only blanks.) Although Sirhan was standing only a few feet in front of Kennedy, the fatal shots were fired into the back of his head from very close range. In perhaps the earliest eyewitness description of the assassination to go out over the radio, eyewitness Don Schulman told reporter Jeff Brent that 'a Caucasian gentleman .... stepped out and fired three times ... hitting Kennedy all three times.' This suggests that Kennedy's assassin was the tall young man rather than the Sirhan lookalike, who was generally described as 'Arabic looking.' Such a conclusion seems justified by remarks Schulman made in 1973, when he explained that he had seen neither Thane Eugene Cesare nor Sirhan shooting at Kennedy. If he had seen neither Sirhan nor Cesare shooting at Kennedy, but had seen a 'Caucasian' man shooting at Kennedy - rather than an Arabic looking Sirhan double - then the only possibility left is he saw the tall young man in the gold shirt shooting Kennedy.

As for the fifth member of the conspiracy, according to Lisa Pease, one witness took note of a young man who was so keen to gain entrance to the event that he purloined a waiter's suit to do so. 'A Hungarian refugee "with absolutely no credentials at all" named Gabor Kadar had been turned away from the Embassy Room during the night, but found a waiter's uniform, and donned it,' she writes. 'Kadar later involved himself directly in the struggle to wrest the gun from Sirhan.' Kadar could have been an admirer of Kennedy's - but he could also have been present in order to create a scuffle centred around Sirhan that would distract the crowd while the conspirators made their escape.

Of course, by focusing on this group of five I do not mean to suggest that no one else in the room was involved in the conspiracy. The participation of at least two other individuals seems all but certain. First, according to a witness who was himself working for the Kennedy campaign, RFK's press secretary Frank Mankiewicz 'was insistent that Bobby leave through the kitchen, rather than the ballroom.' If Kennedy had not walked through the jampacked pantry he almost certainly would not have been shot. The same source reveals that, according to the book Final Judgment, by Michael Collins Piper, 'Mankiewicz started his career as a public relations man for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) of B'nai B'rith in Los Angeles.' (NOTE 3) As we will see, there are reasons to suspect that the RFK assassination was a joint ADL/FBI operation.

Second, there are compelling reasons to think that security guard Thane Eugene Cesare, who Schulman saw fire several shots at Sirhan, was involved. Although Cesare denies having fired his pistol at all that night, he has been caught out lying with respect to several matters about which an innocent person would not have needed to lie. (NOTE 4) Yet it is not necessarily the case that Cesare is lying when he insists, as he does, that he did not shoot Kennedy. The possibility is that this self-admitted supporter of the campaign of RFK's segregationist opponent, George Wallace, had the job of eliminating Sirhan before he could be taken into custody. It is likely that Sirhan's baffling notebook, which was recovered from his bedroom within hours of the shooting, represented the sole insight posterity was supposed to receive into the nature of Sirhan's reasons for killing RFK. If so, this is the one aspect of the plot that backfired, for Sirhan left the scene without any life threatening injuries.

This website sets out a theory of who the girl in the polka dot dress was. Since she was clearly Sirhan's handler, establishing who she was is probably the only means we have of finding out who killed RFK and why.

NOTES

(1) http://scribblguy.50megs.com/illusion2.htm
(2) E.g., the 'Sirhan' seen firing a pistol from shortly after 11am to 5pm on June 4 at the San Gabriel Valley Gun Club in Duarte, California. It is hard to see what the real Sirhan would have had to gain from shooting for nearly six hours apart from a sore trigger finger. On the other hand, it made pretty damn sure that anyone who happened to be at the Gun Club that day would have remembered 'Sirhan' only too well.
(3) http://www.barnesreview.org/July_2003/Robert_F/robert_f.html
(4) Dan Moldea's book, The Killing of Robert Kennedy, New York, Norton & Co., 1995, which is the only work on the assassination available in most popular bookstores, seems unusually concerned with vindicating Cesare against allegations that he was involved. Given that Cesare is clearly lying about many matters related to the assassination, one can only regard Moldea's work with great suspicion. On this subject, see Jim DiEugenio, "The Curious Case of Dan Moldea." Part of this article can be read online at http://www.webcom.com/ctka/pr598-mold.html.

BELOW: 26 year old Thane Eugene Cesare was hired at the last minute by the Ace Guard Service (a security company) to provide 'crowd control' at the Kennedy event. It now seems indisputable that he fired his gun during the assassination. What seems is doubt is only whether he shot Kennedy or whether he botched the job to eliminate Sirhan.




For information about the RFK assassination: