Thanks to Lisa Pease for forwarding Gaeton Fonzi's Reply from a Conspiracy Believer to Vincent Bugliosi for his "tautologically strained" Reclaiming History. Fonzi was one of the principal staff investigators of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, and his account, The Last Investigation, should be on every shortlist of essential titles pertaining to the JFK assassination. Bugliosi both lists The Last Investigation as a source and dismisses it as biased because Fonzi "had long been a conspiracy theorist.” Fonzi never was. "I went from an agnostic to a conspiracy believer," he writes, on the weight of evidence he had a hand in uncovering. (Most significantly, and convincingly, the identification of the CIA's David Atlee Phillips as Veciana's - and hence Oswald's - "Maurice Bishop.")

Bugliosi is a strange one. He could hardly make the claim that his own JFK book is unbiased scholarship. Rather, it's a prosecutor's case for Oswald as the lone gunman. Yet he was an early champion of reopening the RFK case against Sirhan Sirhan, and contributed some important investigative work that undermined the official account:

In 1975, Vincent Bugliosi, who was then working with Schrade to get the case reopened, tracked down the two police officers depicted in the photograph. To that time their identity had been unknown. Bugliosi identified the two officers as Sgt. Charles Wright and Sgt. Robert Rozzi. Both Wright and Rozzi were sure that what they observed was not only a bullet hole, but a hole containing a bullet.

If the hole contained a bullet, then it would have been the ninth bullet, since seven bullets had been recovered from victim wounds and the eighth was to have disappeared into the ceiling (necessary to account for acknowledged holes in the ceiling tiles). So any additional bullet presented a serious problem for those wishing to state there was no conspiracy.

In a declaration filed with the courts, Bugliosi stated:

"Sgt. Rozzi had told me and he told me unequivocally that it was a bullet in the hole and when I told him that Sgt. Rozzi had informed me that he was pretty sure that the bullet was removed from the hole, Sgt. Wright replied 'There is no pretty sure about it. It definitely was removed from the hole, but I do not know who did it.'"

Shortly after the assassination, the LAPD removed the doorjambs and ceiling panels in the Ambassador Hotel and booked them into evidence. One has to wonder why someone would tear off a doorframe or book a ceiling panel into evidence if it contained no evidence of bullets.

[b]Bugliosi is also major figure in Turner and Christian's important The Assassination of Robert F Kennedy, passionately arguing there was a "conspiracy mosaic" behind Sirhan's conviction, and in the same year defended KCOP-TV in televangelist Jerry Owen's libel suit that the Los Angeles station had falsely accused him of a relationship with RFK's conspirators.[/b]

In his closing argument (Owen, by the way, won the case, and the TV station was found guilty of slander), Bugliosi contended that "not too long ago, anyone who uttered 'conspiracy' or 'CIA' was chalked off as a 'conspiracy buff':

But recent revelations, your Honor, have indicated that there is a little more credibility to the word "conspiracy." If there is a conspiracy here it could possibly involve people in the highest levels of our government, or people out of the government who had substantial political interests inimicable to Senator Kennedy. And if it was a conspiracy, it most likely was a conspiracy of considerable magnitude, and someone like Owen would have been a lowly operative.

Yes, that's Vincent Bugliosi talking.

So how do we explain him? How could he be so right about Sirhan and RFK - not to mention the stolen election of 2000 - and so wrong about Oswald and JFK? Maybe he's in someone's keep; maybe he's too smart to be so stupid. Or maybe, here, he's just sincerely wrong. I'm often told off in shrill emails that I must be a shill, because how can I possibly not see what they see? (And I think, in every instance, they've had something to do with controlled demolition, Ron Paul or the International Jewish Conspiracy©.) So perhaps Bugliosi, like Chomsky, just doesn't see this, and it will have to remain a mystery to me why they can't. Because I believe that it's possible for intelligent people to sincerely arrive at conclusions I believe profoundly wrong. That may lead me sometimes to naive assumptions, but I also believe it hubris to think otherwise.
http://rigint.blogspot.com/2007/12/things-that-dont-add-up.html

Released 1976, produced by attorney Mark Lane, author of Rush To Judgement (1966).

Lane tells the story of Deputy Sheriff Roger Craig. Craig was on duty on November 22nd, and made crucial observations. Unlike others, he saw nothing wrong in telling people the truth of what he observed. After his name appeared in books, articles etc., his life changed, not for the better. Attempts were made on his life; his car blew up, he was shot at, and he was practically forced off the road and barely survived the accident.

Amongst his many crucial observations at the Plaza, is Oswald running down the Grassy Knoll, being picked up by a slow driving station wagon, heading west in Elm St. After being signaled to. Also the rifle with the clear stamp on the barrel reading "7.65 Mauser" found in the depository. That is only some of the crucial observations he made.