Tag: assassinations

The one story that still haunts Barbour decades later is former New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison’s probe of the JFK murder.

Barbour twice tried to get Jim Garrison’s story told to a wide audience. Both times he was thwarted.

He ended producing his own documentary based on the most intensive interview Garrison ever gave. Garrison came to focus on the assassination simply because so many of the key figures had operated in Las Vegas, his hometown, prior to the dark events of November 22nd.

Barbour studied the Warren Commission report which put the sole blame on Lee Harvey Oswald. “He realized that, to believe the Warren Report,  you couldn’t read it, so he reopened the investigation into the assassination,” Barbour said during a 2009 interview.

Garrison focused on a CIA connected New Orleans businessman named Clay Shaw. His prosecution of Shaw was portrayed in Oliver Stone’s controversial movie, JFK.

Shaw was not convicted, in large part because of overt interference from the CIA, including a smear campaign against Garrison and the infiltration of his office by government agents. “If he had nothing, they would have just stepped aside and let him fall on his face,” Barbour said. “Instead, they spent two years throwing roadblocks in the way.”

Among the most compelling arguments developed by Garrison was the absurdity of the so-called magic bullet theory. More importantly, Garrison used the FBI’s own files to prove that Oswald wasn’t the shooter.

Barbour says the mafia was involved, but only at the direction of those in the government who wanted Kennedy dead. “If the federal government thought that the Mafia had killed Kennedy, there wouldn’t be a pizza parlor in America.”

He believes the plot has its roots in Las Vegas. It began when the CIA asked the late Robert Maheu to recruit mobsters to kill Fidel Castro.

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