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MORI DocID: 1451843

The Washington Merry-Go-Round                THE WASHINGTON POST    Tuesday, Feb. 23, 1971    B11

Castro Stalker Worked for the CIA

By Jack Anderson

The mystery man whom the Central Intelligence Agency was compelled to assassinate Cuba's Fidel Castro is now languishing in the sick ward of the Atchison County Jail.

He is handsome, hawk-faced John Roselli, once a key figure around Hollywood and Las Vegas, now a pesky 66-year-old inmate with a respiratory ailment.

Confidential FBI files identify him as "one shifty character" who watched over "the concealed interests in the Vegas casinos of the underworld."

Roselli has admitted to friends that he was recruited during the Roaring Twenties Operating along the East Coast, he learned how to evade Coast Guard cutters and police His crime later became United States biggest names in the Chicago and Las Vegas underworld, until Castro's rise to power developed contacts in the Cuban underworld before Castro took over the Havana gambling.

He had the right background for a bushwhack mission that the CIA was planning in 1961. At the time, the Bay of Pigs invasion, the CIA hoped to knock off Castro and leave Cuba leaderless.

Risks Neck

Roselli was recruited for the job by Robert Maheu, a former Bissell with deadly poisons still on the CIA payroll to us that he had recruited his through a relative of Castro's spy chief to plant in the director's food. Later, machinery was set up in Switzerland with renamed Belgian dig-nitaries who flies attempted to intimidate Castro's operatives down. All told, six assassination attempts were made or the bush was had "back." Said Harvey, "The Friars Club raid a 'burn rap.'" Said Harvey, "The club is innocent. Is Roselli's help needed to go?"

Roselli was so flattered over being asked to perform a secret mission for the U.S. Government that he paid all his agencies out of his own pocket and risked his neck to accomplish the task on the Castro-led Chicago racket with Sam Giancana to line up a contact. The confidential files report that Giancana had gambling interest and an interest in the shrimp business in Cuba." However, the CIA spy senator took no direct part in the assassination plot.

Roselli made miniature dashboards to Cuba with hired assassins in town overcoats. Once a Cuban patrol ship turned its guns on his darkened boat, tore a hole in the hull and sank it. The boat, Roselli was fished out of the water by the other boat, which escaped into the shadows.

In earlier columns, we reported how the CIA furnished "to Indianapolis and O'Connell.

[Second Column]

Firearm Fiasco

Under pressure from the firearms lobby, the Treasury Department has failed to enforce a vital section of the 1968 federal firearms act.

The law was passed after the murders of Sen. Robert Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King. It authorizes the Treasury Secretary to require full reports of all firearms and ammunition sales.

For the two years that the law has been in force, the Treasury Department has 25-item gun provision. The gun industry has complained it would be a "bookkeeping nightmare."

The federal government would have to compile and file 300 million it would cut gun sales.

Roselli's Reward

The FBI which got wind of the assassination plot has tried to pump Roselli for information. But he was sworn to silence by the CIA, and up to this moment, he hasn't broken it.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department, as part of its crackdown on organized crime, has tried to deport Roselli. The FBI discovered that his name was really Filippo Sacco and that he had come to this country illegally as an alien.

He was also convicted of a conspiracy to rig card games at the Los Angeles Friars Club.

Of Roselli's two CIA associates, Harvey has now retired and Jim O'Connell.

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