• Submitted by: admin
• International
• North America
• Politics and Government
• 06 / 27 / 2007

Washington, D.C. - According to documents released Tuesday by the CIA, mobster John Roselli, hoping to avoid deportation, threatened to expose CIA plots to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro, but the CIA refused to intercede on his behalf.
According to documents released Tuesday by the CIA, mobster John Roselli, hoping to avoid deportation, threatened to expose CIA plots to kill Cuban leader Fidel Castro, but the CIA refused to intercede on his behalf.

Contained amid hundreds of pages of CIA internal reports released Tuesday collectively known as "the family jewels," the official confirmation of the 1960 plot against Castro was certain to be welcomed by communist authorities as more proof of their longstanding claims that the United States wants Castro dead.

The plots -- which included efforts to use poison pills against the communist revolutionary -- were scotched after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, according to one memorandum released under the federal Freedom of Information Act.

Roselli, one of the top Mafia figures in Los Angeles, had been convicted in 1968 of entering the United States illegally and was awaiting deportation. His appeals exhausted, his attorney approached the CIA in 1970 to warn that "if someone did not intercede on Roselli's behalf, he would make a complete expose of his activities with the agency."

Then-CIA Director Richard Helms was told about the threat that November, "and it was decided that the agency would not in any way assist Roselli," the document states.