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A commission congressman vanished over Alaska
George de Mohrenschildt wasn't the only witness connected to JFK who turned up dead or didn't turn up at all. Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana was shot in his kitchen before he could testify about the CIA's plots against Castro. Mobster Johnny Roselli went missing and turned up in an oil drum. Ex-cop Richard Cain, linked to both the mob and the CIA, was killed in a sandwich shop in Chicago.
Hale Boggs was a congressman and a member of the Warren Commission. In the 1970s he publicly criticized the Warren Report and called for a new investigation. In 1972, he disappeared in a small plane over Alaska, and the wreckage was never found.
Why did the CIA recruit mobsters against Castro?
The Senate's Church Committee reported in 1975 that the CIA approached former FBI agent Robert Maheu in 1960 about a plot against Fidel Castro. Maheu contacted Johnny Roselli, who brought in Sam Giancana. The thinking was that gangsters with casino interests in Havana had contacts inside Cuba. The plots included poison pills, and none of them succeeded. Castro died in 2016 at age 90.
How did Hale Boggs disappear?
On October 16, 1972, a twin-engine Cessna carrying Boggs, Alaska congressman Nick Begich, an aide, and the pilot vanished on a flight from Anchorage to Juneau. A large air and sea search by the Coast Guard and the Air Force found no wreckage. The two congressmen were declared legally dead in December 1972. Begich had been on the ballot for reelection, and voters returned him to office posthumously in November 1972.
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