November 21, 2025 • 11 mins
George Noory and investigative journalist Mark Shaw explore the killing of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, the problems he's found with the autopsy and investigation into the shooting, and his evidence that a mobster in prison confessed to his role in having Kennedy killed.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Norri with
who We've got a very special program for you tonight.
In a few days, it'll be almost sixty two years
since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I was
thirteen years old. I remember that day explicitly, and who
could ever forget Walter Cronkite from CBS News.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
From Dallas, Texas the flash apparently official. President Kennedy died
at one pm Central Standard time two o'clock Eastern Standard time,
some thirty eight minutes ago. Vice President Johnson has left
(00:47):
the hospital in Dallas, but we do not know to
where he has proceeded. Presumably he will be taking the
oath of office shortly and become the thirty sixthsident of
the United States.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Momentary silence you heard was Walter Cronkite breaking up when
he was saying the story. Now, a couple of years ago,
my English teacher, Nancy Leonard was on the program. She
has since passed away, and she was the one who
came in and told us what had happened to the president.
She was crying and we were all kids kind of upset,
not knowing what was really going on. It was an
(01:24):
unbelievable situation, but thanks to people like Mark Shaw and
Jerome Corsi, hopefully one day we will find out what happened.
Mark Shaw is an investigative reporter, noted historian and author.
His books include The Reporter Who Too Much, chronicling the
lifetimes and mysterious death of celebrated journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, who
(01:45):
was investigating the jfk assassination and it might have gotten
or killed, Abusive Powers, a book that came out just recently,
and Fighting for Justice. Mark, Welcome to the program.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
Thank you, George, thanks for having me.
Speaker 5 (01:58):
Boy that cronkite voice there, I remember when he had
trouble going forward, you know, and it just hit us
all so hard.
Speaker 4 (02:08):
But it was it was.
Speaker 5 (02:09):
Conki, who I've always respected so much that you could
tell how upset he was for sure.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
And you know what has just hit me the last
couple of days ago, Mark, we're coming up on sixty
two years.
Speaker 5 (02:22):
Yeah, we are, And I thought i'd do the same
thing I did the last time a little bit when
I was on your program. It's giving us a little
bit of a history lesson of where we've come from
that assassination, because I got I always get a lot
of emails from around the world for people that listen
to your program, and I think they enjoyed our doing that.
So if we can remember JFK, you know, has passed away,
(02:45):
and then JEdgar Hoover takes center stage and right away
he goes to Oswald alone that they've captured the man
who did it. That's the end of the story, and
so on and so forth. He you know, we talked
about the fact that they stole basically stole the JFK's
body and sent it off to Washington. The autopsy should
(03:06):
have been done in Dallas, but it wasn't, and there's
always been a lot of complications and a lot of
question marks about that autopsy.
Speaker 4 (03:13):
You remember.
Speaker 5 (03:15):
Doctor wet who was on your program, I know a
few times, and he said it was the worst autopsy
he ever saw. Then there were the problems with where
the shots came from. Did they come from the front
or the back, and all of that, and so that
was all then a part of the part of the
investigation by the Warren Commission, and I think all of
us believed, at least I certainly did, that they were
(03:36):
going to get to the get to the bottom of
what happened.
Speaker 4 (03:39):
They were going to give us the truth of what occurred.
But they got stuck on that.
Speaker 5 (03:43):
Oswald alone stuff that Hoover was was proclaiming and never
really you know, completed a thorough investigation at that particular point,
so the Oswald alone theory lived on. We then got
to the House and things called the House Select Committee
on Assassinations, and they investigated another government agency and they
(04:07):
came to the conclusion that most everything pointed to a
mobster in New Orleans named Carlos Marcello having been the
one who had the strongest motive to have eliminated JFK.
Speaker 4 (04:20):
But they didn't feel like they had enough evidence to.
Speaker 5 (04:23):
Really go forward and specifically say that that's who did it.
They had the Church Committee, named after one of the senators.
They kind of again followed a bit of the House
Select Committee on Assassinations, so we didn't get too much
new information there. And so now in this particular year,
things started to get exciting because we heard that, according
(04:46):
to the President, they were going to release and they
did in April of this year the JFK assassination's records,
also the Robert Kennedy assassinations records, and they convened what
was called the Task Force on the kind to make
sure I always get that right, the task Force on
What'd I do with it? The task Force on the
(05:07):
government secrets, and the fact that they were going to
look into what documents had been hidden through the years,
and you know, what was not given to the public,
and so on and so forth, and so that was convened.
Congresswoman Anna Pauline Luna was the one who was in
charge of that particular task force and still is. And
(05:29):
so they were looking into the assassination and I told
you that those assassinations. So I told you the last
time when I was on the program that I had
such great hopes because I remember, I'm just going to
quote basically what Luna said when it came out that
they were going to deal with sixty years of half
half truce, deceptions.
Speaker 4 (05:48):
And out light outright lies.
Speaker 5 (05:51):
At worst, they were just they were deceiving aspects from
the United States Congress.
Speaker 4 (05:57):
Is what happened. It's time for the truth.
Speaker 5 (06:00):
And so I had some really good feelings that things
were going to go forward to that end. When I
found out the task force had been convened, I went
ahead and said, as I told you the last time,
three or four letters to.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
Congressman Lutna, the Congresswoman Luna.
Speaker 5 (06:14):
Saying, look, here's my reacher, my research, seventy five pages
worth of research about the JFK assassination.
Speaker 4 (06:22):
You're welcome to use it with your investigation.
Speaker 5 (06:25):
I'm happy to appear on one of your hearings at
one of your hearings if you want me to. I
even had the opportunity to speak with her for a
few minutes, and she said, I very recept you to that.
And so I really felt like that they were going
to do what hadn't happened before, and that was due
a full investigation looking at every.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
Alternative that there could be.
Speaker 5 (06:44):
And unfortunately, then threw some influence from a researcher named
Jefferson Morley, they got stuck again on the whole Oswald
alone situation and adding the CIA situation to it. So
their investigation thus far has been focused on Oswald CIA
(07:06):
involvement in the JFK assassination.
Speaker 4 (07:08):
But to my dismay, morally, on.
Speaker 5 (07:11):
Some of the television shows and Luna and so on
and so forth have said, well, we should tell you
that we're not going to be able to go ahead
and give you a definitive idea of what happened, because
there's no.
Speaker 4 (07:24):
There's no direct evidence that.
Speaker 5 (07:26):
The CIA or Oswalt was involved in the JFK assassination.
I mean, at one point Morley came out and said,
we can't even prove that Oswald shot the president. So
that really was disturbing to me, and so I decided
to try to do something about it. I wrote the
letters and so on and so forth, and I told
them of my research and the whole Carlos Marcelo situation
(07:50):
that had been looked upon way back when, but nobody
could quite define exactly what his responsibility was for that
and so on, so based on motive. So that's where
I was, probably two or three four months ago, very
frustrated that they wouldn't go forward, and I already felt
like that I had to continue to try to get
(08:12):
them to at least look at the alternative of the
Marcelo situation. And there's some brand new evidence that I'm
going to give you this morning. I think I might
have mentioned the last time and then there's a beacon
of help, a beacon of light, I should say that
has happened today actually in.
Speaker 4 (08:31):
New York City and in Washington, d C.
Speaker 5 (08:33):
That may very well send us towards what really happened.
On November twenty second, nineteen sixty three.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Mark some time ago, I met the granddaughter of Carlos Marcelo.
She works at a restaurant here in Saint Louis. I
did not I did not bring up her grandfather at
that time, But the next time I'm out there, I
think I'm going to start bringing it up. It's an
amazing yeh story.
Speaker 5 (08:58):
You know a lot of people who are still alive anymore.
We just had the celebration of Dorothy Kilgallen's co naming
of the street for her in New York City. We
can talk about a little bit Dorothy kill Gallen Way,
but we could only find one person who actually knew
Dorothy kill Gallen back in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 4 (09:17):
So many people have passed away.
Speaker 5 (09:20):
But I do see some hope here because maybe you know,
and I may have mentioned it the last time, that
when those jfk assassination records were released, I looked everywhere
for anything about Dorothy kill Gallen.
Speaker 4 (09:33):
Nothing in there.
Speaker 5 (09:34):
I looked for everywhere, went through thousands of pages to
see if the Carlos Marcello.
Speaker 4 (09:42):
Question mark was in there. Nothing.
Speaker 5 (09:44):
And yet one day I was able to find out
that there were actually fourteen hundred FBI documents that they
thought were in the in the National Archives. They thought
they were in the JFK assassin.
Speaker 4 (09:58):
Ration records, but actually they were not.
Speaker 5 (10:02):
And so I really plowed through those and one of
the things I was able to find was what I
will call this evening for your listeners, is the Carlos
Marcello confession. Now we have to set that up because
how did it occur? And I've really got an awful
lot of new things in the book this time. I
think people be fascinated by some of the research.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
But what I was able to.
Speaker 5 (10:24):
Find was that in nineteen eighty six, Carlos Marcello was
in a prison in Texarkana, Texas, a federal prison.
Speaker 4 (10:33):
He had been found guilty.
Speaker 5 (10:35):
I believe it was bribing a jury or juror or
something like that. So what the FBI decided to do
because they believed he was involved in the JFK assassination,
was put a Stuley in there and the man's name
was Jack Ronald Van Lanningham.
Speaker 4 (10:52):
And it's interesting with his background. I'm not going to
go into it. People can look at it in the book.
Speaker 5 (10:57):
But they put him in the prison, got him, know
Carlos Marcelo. He became a cell mate, and then what
happened is that in the prison yard. This is exactly
what happened. I'm gonna watch my language a little bit,
but this is exactly what happened in terms of the
account that is in the FBI records.
Speaker 4 (11:15):
I think it's very credible.
Speaker 5 (11:18):
Marcello, who had said, unlike as he did often with
tie raids against John Kennedy, on this occasion, Carlos Marcelo said,
referring to President Kenny Kennedy, Yeah, I had the soob kill.
I'm glad I did. I'm sorry I couldn't have done
(11:38):
it myself.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to coastam
dot com for more
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
And welcome back to Coast to Coast George Norri with
who We've got a very special program for you tonight.
In a few days, it'll be almost sixty two years
since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. I was
thirteen years old. I remember that day explicitly, and who
could ever forget Walter Cronkite from CBS News.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
From Dallas, Texas the flash apparently official. President Kennedy died
at one pm Central Standard time two o'clock Eastern Standard time,
some thirty eight minutes ago. Vice President Johnson has left
(00:47):
the hospital in Dallas, but we do not know to
where he has proceeded. Presumably he will be taking the
oath of office shortly and become the thirty sixthsident of
the United States.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Momentary silence you heard was Walter Cronkite breaking up when
he was saying the story. Now, a couple of years ago,
my English teacher, Nancy Leonard was on the program. She
has since passed away, and she was the one who
came in and told us what had happened to the president.
She was crying and we were all kids kind of upset,
not knowing what was really going on. It was an
(01:24):
unbelievable situation, but thanks to people like Mark Shaw and
Jerome Corsi, hopefully one day we will find out what happened.
Mark Shaw is an investigative reporter, noted historian and author.
His books include The Reporter Who Too Much, chronicling the
lifetimes and mysterious death of celebrated journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, who
(01:45):
was investigating the jfk assassination and it might have gotten
or killed, Abusive Powers, a book that came out just recently,
and Fighting for Justice. Mark, Welcome to the program.
Speaker 4 (01:57):
Thank you, George, thanks for having me.
Speaker 5 (01:58):
Boy that cronkite voice there, I remember when he had
trouble going forward, you know, and it just hit us
all so hard.
Speaker 4 (02:08):
But it was it was.
Speaker 5 (02:09):
Conki, who I've always respected so much that you could
tell how upset he was for sure.
Speaker 2 (02:14):
And you know what has just hit me the last
couple of days ago, Mark, we're coming up on sixty
two years.
Speaker 5 (02:22):
Yeah, we are, And I thought i'd do the same
thing I did the last time a little bit when
I was on your program. It's giving us a little
bit of a history lesson of where we've come from
that assassination, because I got I always get a lot
of emails from around the world for people that listen
to your program, and I think they enjoyed our doing that.
So if we can remember JFK, you know, has passed away,
(02:45):
and then JEdgar Hoover takes center stage and right away
he goes to Oswald alone that they've captured the man
who did it. That's the end of the story, and
so on and so forth. He you know, we talked
about the fact that they stole basically stole the JFK's
body and sent it off to Washington. The autopsy should
(03:06):
have been done in Dallas, but it wasn't, and there's
always been a lot of complications and a lot of
question marks about that autopsy.
Speaker 4 (03:13):
You remember.
Speaker 5 (03:15):
Doctor wet who was on your program, I know a
few times, and he said it was the worst autopsy
he ever saw. Then there were the problems with where
the shots came from. Did they come from the front
or the back, and all of that, and so that
was all then a part of the part of the
investigation by the Warren Commission, and I think all of
us believed, at least I certainly did, that they were
(03:36):
going to get to the get to the bottom of
what happened.
Speaker 4 (03:39):
They were going to give us the truth of what occurred.
But they got stuck on that.
Speaker 5 (03:43):
Oswald alone stuff that Hoover was was proclaiming and never
really you know, completed a thorough investigation at that particular point,
so the Oswald alone theory lived on. We then got
to the House and things called the House Select Committee
on Assassinations, and they investigated another government agency and they
(04:07):
came to the conclusion that most everything pointed to a
mobster in New Orleans named Carlos Marcello having been the
one who had the strongest motive to have eliminated JFK.
Speaker 4 (04:20):
But they didn't feel like they had enough evidence to.
Speaker 5 (04:23):
Really go forward and specifically say that that's who did it.
They had the Church Committee, named after one of the senators.
They kind of again followed a bit of the House
Select Committee on Assassinations, so we didn't get too much
new information there. And so now in this particular year,
things started to get exciting because we heard that, according
(04:46):
to the President, they were going to release and they
did in April of this year the JFK assassination's records,
also the Robert Kennedy assassinations records, and they convened what
was called the Task Force on the kind to make
sure I always get that right, the task Force on
What'd I do with it? The task Force on the
(05:07):
government secrets, and the fact that they were going to
look into what documents had been hidden through the years,
and you know, what was not given to the public,
and so on and so forth, and so that was convened.
Congresswoman Anna Pauline Luna was the one who was in
charge of that particular task force and still is. And
(05:29):
so they were looking into the assassination and I told
you that those assassinations. So I told you the last
time when I was on the program that I had
such great hopes because I remember, I'm just going to
quote basically what Luna said when it came out that
they were going to deal with sixty years of half
half truce, deceptions.
Speaker 4 (05:48):
And out light outright lies.
Speaker 5 (05:51):
At worst, they were just they were deceiving aspects from
the United States Congress.
Speaker 4 (05:57):
Is what happened. It's time for the truth.
Speaker 5 (06:00):
And so I had some really good feelings that things
were going to go forward to that end. When I
found out the task force had been convened, I went
ahead and said, as I told you the last time,
three or four letters to.
Speaker 4 (06:12):
Congressman Lutna, the Congresswoman Luna.
Speaker 5 (06:14):
Saying, look, here's my reacher, my research, seventy five pages
worth of research about the JFK assassination.
Speaker 4 (06:22):
You're welcome to use it with your investigation.
Speaker 5 (06:25):
I'm happy to appear on one of your hearings at
one of your hearings if you want me to. I
even had the opportunity to speak with her for a
few minutes, and she said, I very recept you to that.
And so I really felt like that they were going
to do what hadn't happened before, and that was due
a full investigation looking at every.
Speaker 4 (06:42):
Alternative that there could be.
Speaker 5 (06:44):
And unfortunately, then threw some influence from a researcher named
Jefferson Morley, they got stuck again on the whole Oswald
alone situation and adding the CIA situation to it. So
their investigation thus far has been focused on Oswald CIA
(07:06):
involvement in the JFK assassination.
Speaker 4 (07:08):
But to my dismay, morally, on.
Speaker 5 (07:11):
Some of the television shows and Luna and so on
and so forth have said, well, we should tell you
that we're not going to be able to go ahead
and give you a definitive idea of what happened, because
there's no.
Speaker 4 (07:24):
There's no direct evidence that.
Speaker 5 (07:26):
The CIA or Oswalt was involved in the JFK assassination.
I mean, at one point Morley came out and said,
we can't even prove that Oswald shot the president. So
that really was disturbing to me, and so I decided
to try to do something about it. I wrote the
letters and so on and so forth, and I told
them of my research and the whole Carlos Marcelo situation
(07:50):
that had been looked upon way back when, but nobody
could quite define exactly what his responsibility was for that
and so on, so based on motive. So that's where
I was, probably two or three four months ago, very
frustrated that they wouldn't go forward, and I already felt
like that I had to continue to try to get
(08:12):
them to at least look at the alternative of the
Marcelo situation. And there's some brand new evidence that I'm
going to give you this morning. I think I might
have mentioned the last time and then there's a beacon
of help, a beacon of light, I should say that
has happened today actually in.
Speaker 4 (08:31):
New York City and in Washington, d C.
Speaker 5 (08:33):
That may very well send us towards what really happened.
On November twenty second, nineteen sixty three.
Speaker 2 (08:42):
Mark some time ago, I met the granddaughter of Carlos Marcelo.
She works at a restaurant here in Saint Louis. I
did not I did not bring up her grandfather at
that time, But the next time I'm out there, I
think I'm going to start bringing it up. It's an
amazing yeh story.
Speaker 5 (08:58):
You know a lot of people who are still alive anymore.
We just had the celebration of Dorothy Kilgallen's co naming
of the street for her in New York City. We
can talk about a little bit Dorothy kill Gallen Way,
but we could only find one person who actually knew
Dorothy kill Gallen back in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 4 (09:17):
So many people have passed away.
Speaker 5 (09:20):
But I do see some hope here because maybe you know,
and I may have mentioned it the last time, that
when those jfk assassination records were released, I looked everywhere
for anything about Dorothy kill Gallen.
Speaker 4 (09:33):
Nothing in there.
Speaker 5 (09:34):
I looked for everywhere, went through thousands of pages to
see if the Carlos Marcello.
Speaker 4 (09:42):
Question mark was in there. Nothing.
Speaker 5 (09:44):
And yet one day I was able to find out
that there were actually fourteen hundred FBI documents that they
thought were in the in the National Archives. They thought
they were in the JFK assassin.
Speaker 4 (09:58):
Ration records, but actually they were not.
Speaker 5 (10:02):
And so I really plowed through those and one of
the things I was able to find was what I
will call this evening for your listeners, is the Carlos
Marcello confession. Now we have to set that up because
how did it occur? And I've really got an awful
lot of new things in the book this time. I
think people be fascinated by some of the research.
Speaker 4 (10:23):
But what I was able to.
Speaker 5 (10:24):
Find was that in nineteen eighty six, Carlos Marcello was
in a prison in Texarkana, Texas, a federal prison.
Speaker 4 (10:33):
He had been found guilty.
Speaker 5 (10:35):
I believe it was bribing a jury or juror or
something like that. So what the FBI decided to do
because they believed he was involved in the JFK assassination,
was put a Stuley in there and the man's name
was Jack Ronald Van Lanningham.
Speaker 4 (10:52):
And it's interesting with his background. I'm not going to
go into it. People can look at it in the book.
Speaker 5 (10:57):
But they put him in the prison, got him, know
Carlos Marcelo. He became a cell mate, and then what
happened is that in the prison yard. This is exactly
what happened. I'm gonna watch my language a little bit,
but this is exactly what happened in terms of the
account that is in the FBI records.
Speaker 4 (11:15):
I think it's very credible.
Speaker 5 (11:18):
Marcello, who had said, unlike as he did often with
tie raids against John Kennedy, on this occasion, Carlos Marcelo said,
referring to President Kenny Kennedy, Yeah, I had the soob kill.
I'm glad I did. I'm sorry I couldn't have done
(11:38):
it myself.
Speaker 1 (11:39):
Listen to more Coast to Coast AM every weeknight at
one a m. Eastern and go to Coast to coastam
dot com for more
The Best of Coast to Coast AM News
Host
George Noory
Popular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.