Overview

"Focusing for the first time on why attorney general Robert F. Kennedy wasn't killed in 1963 instead of on why President John F. Kennedy was, Mark Shaw offers a stunning and provocative assassination theory that leads directly to the family patriarch, Joseph P. Kennedy. Mining fresh information and more than forty new interviews, Shaw weaves a spellbinding narrative involving Mafia don Carlos Marcello; Jack Ruby (Lee Harvey Oswald's killer); Ruby's attorney, Melvin Belli; and, ultimately, the Kennedy brothers and their father. Shaw addresses these tantalizing questions: Why, shortly after his brother's death, did a grief-stricken RFK tell a colleague, ""I thought they would get one of us . . . I thought it would be me""? Why was Belli, an attorney with almost no defense experience (but proven ties to the Mafia), chosen as Jack Ruby's attorney? How does Belli's Mafia connection call into question his legal strategy, which ultimately led to the Ruby's first-degree murder conviction and death sentence? What was Joseph Kennedy's relationship to organized crime? And how was his insistence that JFK appoint RFK as attorney general tantamount to signing the president's death warrant? For fifty years, Shaw maintains, researchers investigating the president's murder in Dallas have been looking at the wrong motives and actors. The Poison Patriarch offers a shocking reassessment-one that is sure to alter the course of future assassination debates."

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9781626360600

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Did a well-known society lawyer keep the secrets of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy? . . . Shaw takes an unusual route into the thicket of JFK conspiracy literature, focusing on the perturbing question of why the flamboyant civil attorney Melvin Belli, an associate of mobsters, would have been recruited to provide Jack Ruby's defense following his televised shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald. --Kirkus Reviews

Author Information

Mark Shaw, author of twenty-plus books, is a former criminal defense attorney who has served as a legal analyst for ABC, ESPN, and USA Today. He is a member of the Assassination Archives and Research Center in Washington, DC, and the Mary Ferrell Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to fostering critical thinking on a range of historical topics, including the assassinations of the 1960s. He lives in Superior, Colorado.

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