'A Skeleton Key To The Gemstone File' Turned 40

"Mae placed a lot of restrictions on me. In the first place, she really didn't want me to read Roberts' letters. She was keeping them a very closely held secret. I can imagine a lot of reasons, but I can't tell you which one is right. She just didn't want this stuff to get out," Caruana said. "I thought it could have something to do with her two uncles who were involved in politics. They were both rabbis who were political--one a Democrat and the other a Republican. Part of this whole Gemstone thing has to do with people's families and how important it is to know who's related to whom and how. These plots and plans and tools really determine what goes on in countries. If you know who's related to whom, it often clarifies things a great deal," Caruana said.

The Skeleton Key distills the massive collection of letters and various writings of Bruce Roberts, who had studied journalism and physics at the University of Wisconsin specializing in crystallography, including the creation of synthetic gems such as rubies. One of the few known pictures of Bruce Roberts, a magazine photo from the 1950s, shows him pinning a synthetic gemstone on the flamboyant entertainer Carmen Miranda. This verifies Roberts' existence as well as his interest in artificial gems. Caruana assured me that this was the Bruce Roberts with whom she had conversed in San Francisco.

According to the Skeleton Key, Roberts had taken some of his synthetic rubies to the Hughes Tool Company hoping to exchange a few of them for use of its facilities. Instead, Hughes employees stole his rubies, which Roberts believed was due to their optical quality and potential use in laser beam research. That episode caused Roberts' profound animosity toward the Mafia generally and Howard Hughes specifically.

Roberts' thesis simply posits that organized crime controls the United States and has since at least 1963. The Skeleton Key begins in 1932, introducing readers to Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, who would one day marry Jackie Kennedy. The Key tells us he made his first million selling "Turkish Tobacco" (opium) in Argentina and during Prohibition used his ships to smuggle alcohol into Boston for Joseph Kennedy. As crowned head of what Roberts called the "International Mafia", Onassis brokered a lucrative deal with the Seven Sisters (major oil companies) whereby they would swindle the Arabs out of their oil and transport it using the fleet of surplus World War 2 "Liberty ships" Onassis had acquired from the US at bargain prices. According to Gemstone, Onassis established a power base in the United States by usurping Howard Hughes's empire. He kidnapped Hughes and arranged a widely publicized "fake" marriage to starlet Jean Peters to explain his seclusion. Onassis, who needed Hughes's signature until a computer could successfully reproduce it, parked Hughes on Skorpios, his private island in the Ionian Sea, turning Hughes into a junkie in order to force his compliance. Onassis then adopted Hughes's "game plan" of buying up senators, judges, congressmen, governors, and major media organizations to take "legal" control of the government en masse for selfish advantage.

The Key states that Joseph Kennedy had "reminded Onassis of an old Mafia promise: the presidency for a Kennedy." Onassis agreed but naturally expected the Kennedys to behave themselves and follow orders. As long as Joseph was directing their affairs, John and Bobby cooperated, but after the elder Kennedy suffered a stroke, his control ended. The brothers embodied new attitudes that sympathetic Americans considered innovative and bold but which detractors perceived as cavalier and arrogant. From the perspective of the Kennedys' underworld sponsors, the brothers appeared ungrateful and renegade--Onassis angered that John Kennedy "welches" on a Mafia deal. "The rest, as they say, is history" the Key says. "Onassis was so confident of his control over police. media, FBI, CIA, Secret Service and the U.S. judicial system that he had JFK murdered before the eyes of the nation; then systematically bought off, killed off or frightened off all witnesses, and had the evidence destroyed; then put a 75-year seal of secrecy over the whole matter."

There are several convincing motives for the Kennedys' murders, and they are not mutually exclusive. In 1961 they had arrested the owner of Air Thailand, whose planes had been flying Onassis's heroin out of Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle; President Kennedy refused to provide air cover at the Bay of Pigs, infuriating the hawks who had arranged the invasion behind his back. Aggravating the situation, Kennedy fired cold warrior and intelligence community icon Allen Dulles as CIA director for lying to him about the Bay of Pigs operation; He supported a bill to revoke the oil depletion allowance, inspiring enmity from oil producers in states such as Texas; He challenged the privately owned and deceptively misnamed Federal Reserve System, essentially a central bank, by ordering the Department of Treasury to issue debt and interest-free currency called "United States Notes," rather than debt-laden "Federal Reserve Notes." As Attorney General, Robert Kennedy began prosecuting members of the Mafia; and President Kennedy intended to modify labor and tax laws so that previously exempt foreign ships could be taxed, presumably a significant issue for shipping tycoons like Onassis.

Interestingly, Allen Dulles had received help in transforming the Office of Strategic services (OSS) into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) from German spymaster Reinhard Gehlen--Adolph Hitler's chief intelligence officer against the Soviet Union. Hawks in the US military-industrial complex shared the Nazis' rabid ideological hatred of the Soviets, a perplexing attitude considering that without Russia the Allies would not have won World War 2. This cozy relationship between US intelligence and post-war German fascists may have been what accused killer Jack Ruby meant when he suggested Nazis were involved in JFK's death.

Dulles largely controlled the Warren Commission, causing critics to question its impartiality and consequently the reliability of its conclusions. Perhaps even more significantly, President Kennedy had vowed to "splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it to the winds." He formalized his intentions on October 11, 1963 by filing National Security Action Memorandum 263. His announcing that he intended to withdraw a thousand troops from Vietnam by the end of 1963 portended a profit-threatening end to the Vietnam War.

Consider the following two examples of claims made in the Skeleton Key that have been validated by subsequent historical developments. Referring to the John Kennedy assassination, the Key claims one of the shooters "went down a manhole and followed a sewer line away from Dealey Plaza." Remember, this was written in 1975. In the 1990s I was watching a History Channel program called "The Men Who Killed Kennedy"--a segment featuring Tom Wilson, who had developed for US Steel a process called "photonics" to detect product imperfections. Wilson applied this new technology to photos in the Kennedy assassination, including the Mary Moorman photo, which she took almost simultaneously with the fatal head shot. Wilson constructed a three-dimensional model of Kennedy's gaping rear head wound and from that traced back the path of the bullet, amazed to see it was coming "out of the ground."

Wilson went to Dealey Plaza and discovered that the path he anticipated led directly to a manhole cover and storm drain. In other words, someone could have been crouching underground shooting at Kennedy from the street. Subsequent studies by a researcher named Jack Brazil have determined that shooters from behind the picket fence on the Grassy Knoll and from the curb on Elm Street could have "squeezed off rounds" and escaped underground in about twenty minutes. The sewer lines lead to the Trinity River well away from Dealey Plaza.

Here is another claim the Key makes that sounded unlikely to me in 1976: "Lots of heroin gets produced in a Pepsi Cola factory in Laos. So far, it hasn't produced a single bottle of Pepsi Cola." I hadn't yet learned about the CIA's "Air America" drug flights, but this was another truth that Roberts understood long before most of the herd. In 1990 Mel Gibson and Robert Downey, Jr. starred in a film called Air America. The film includes the Pepsi-Cola factory, the CIA, and the heroin. Details like these over the years make me believe that Bruce Roberts knew more than the average citizen about past history and current events. Eventually, Caruana trekked to San Francisco to meet Roberts--a story she details in her 2006 book, The Gemstone File: A Memoir--to validate what he was telling her. She intended to visit the various embassies Roberts had mentioned. If he had written to them as he claimed, his letters should be in their files.

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