Discussion on Robert F. Kennedy's Assassination

Paul Schrade, who was with my father when he was shot,

was a union leader, one of the heads of the UA-

United Auto Workers.

He was the guy who recruited Cesar Chavez into the labor

movement. Huh. And, and he introduced him to my father,

and they became

best friends. Mm.

A-and so Paul was very, very close to my father, and was with

him.

The first bullet that Sirhan fired,

um, hit Paul Schrade in the head. Oh.

And Paul Schrade has never believed

that Sirhan killed my father.

Wow. He knows that he shot him. But Sirhan...

Oh, and, and so I... And, uh, Paul

forced me to sit down to read the autopsy report, stuff I never

wanted to do,

a-and to look at all the evidence that has accumulated since my father's

death.

And- So Ethel's your mother, eh? E-Ethel is my mother.

All right. Oh, Sirhan

was- Wow ... seventy-seven eyewitnesses in the kitchen

of the Ambassador Hotel when my father was killed.

And many, many of them had a, a,

a view of what happened. A very few of them could view the

whole scene, but they could view parts of it.

E-everybody, without exception,

places Sirhan from

five feet to ten feet away from my father in front of

him. He never got behind him. He was always in front with a table

between them,

a stained table.

Sirhan fired two shots at my father.

The first one hit Paul Schrade in the head.

The second one hit a doorjamb at my father's head level

behind my father.

Then he was grabbed by Carl Ulcer, who was the,

um, who was the concierge at the Ambassador

Hotel,

and by Rayford Johnson and six other people.

It was a dog pile, and they all piled on him,

and they grabbed ...

The first thing they did was grab his hand.

They directed it in the opposite direction, and they could not get the gun

away from him. And he was powerful a-as a, like a

superman, they said. Mm. They were all trying to take the gun away from

him.

He's only this big. He, uh, he's a little guy.

And he fired six shots in the other

direction.

All of them hit people.

Huh.

O-one person got hit twice,

but all those bullets are accounted for.

There were only eight chambers in his gun.

A-and two were fired toward my father and six in the opposite direction, and we

know what happened to every one of those bullets.

My father was shot four times. One of the

shots, and he ... A-all four times were from behind.

What? A-and with a gun that was,

um,

that was ... A-and they were all what the coroner, Thomas Noguchi,

said

contact shots.

The barrel of the gun was touching my father- Of course, yeah

... when the, when the trigger was pulled.

And he had carbon tattoos from all four shots.

Um, one of the shots went harmlessly through

his sleeve and through

his shoulder pad.

A-all of the shots were fired from a low angle toward the

ceiling.

Whoever fired those shots was standing behind him,

concealing the gun

and firing at the same time that Sirhan was distracting

people, essentially.

A-and the person who almost certainly fired those

shots

was a security guard who was holding my father's arm at

that time called

Eugene S-Zanczer. A-a-and a dozen people

saw him with his gun drawn.

My father fell back on him, and as he fell, he turned

and pulled off

Z-Zanczer's clip-on tie.

Zanczer lied to the police about his gun.

He told many, many different stories about

when he had drawn his

gun.

He lied. He said he did own a .22. The police didn't-- talked to

him that night, didn't confiscate his gun.

Uh, the time they talked to him, he said, "Yeah, I owned a .22, but I sold it a

month before the shooting."

As it turns out, that was a lie. He sold it a month after the shooting,

and he sold it to a man who worked at him, with him in the high

security section of the Lockheed factory here in Los Angeles,

who then moved to Arkansas, later talked to investigators and said,

"Yeah." He, he had a receipt for when it was sold, and it was sold in July.

My father was killed in June.

And Zanczer told him at that time,

um, "This gun was used in a crime, so don't talk to anybody about it."

Zanczer, it, as it turns out,

was, is a c- a, a,

a ... He died about three weeks ago.

Wow. And he died in the Philippines, where he's lived for the past

three decades.

What? A-and, um, but he's almost

certainly the person who, who killed my father.

Now,

his job as a security guard that

night he got five days before,

when it was already known that my father was gonna be speaking

there.

We don't know exactly what happened, but there are ...

And then, you know, the investigation was a botched

investigation, appears to have been deliberately botched

by the

LAPD.

It, it was run by people within the LAPD, all

of whom had ... They were ... There was a special unit

created called Special Unit Senator to investigate my father's

death.

Almost all the members of that unit were ex-CIA

agents who had

trained in a CIA farm in Virginia

and shipped down to Latin America to do dirty tricks work there and then

brought back for this investigation.

And they destroyed, before Sirhan's trial,

they destroyed 1,200 pieces of evidence, including all

the bullets.

And about 1,200

photographs as well that were taken in the room that night.

So,

you know, there's a lot of questions.

There's never, there really, I believed that there had been a trial.

As it turns out, there wasn't a trial.

Sirhan's attorney

was an attorney who

somehow, and nobody can explain how, he was a mob

attorney

who was representing Johnny Roselli,

who had been, at that time, there was a famous trial in Los

Angeles called the Friars Club trial.

You know what the Friars Club is? Please. What is it?

The Friars Club is where they started roasts.

Oh, okay. And it was

all the Rat Pack

actors like Joey Bishop and Frank Sinatra and- Dean ...

and Dean Martin and- Sandy Davis ...

yeah, all of those guys were members of the Friar Club.

And they'd get together every couple of months and roast one of their members.

Hmm.

And to get in there, you had to be wearing a tux.

They also had a gambling,

a poker game or a gambling casino. I'm not sure which, but there

was a poker game

in there.

And as it turns out, Johnny Roselli was the owner of the club.

Johnny Roselli was the CIA's

liaison to the mob. Wow, that's a trip.

You know, I used to read about him. He was in the 20s too. Yeah.

He was an interesting guy. He was a devout Catholic.

He didn't have a home address, but he was tied in with Gene

Conner, but also Carlos Masalo and Trafficante.

He had installed secret cameras in the

Friars Club so they could read everybody's cards, and they were cheating.

He got caught,

and he was on trial at the time my father was killed.

It was a huge trial.

During that trial, his attorney got arrested

for having the grand jury

transcripts, which is illegal for anybody to have.

It's a serious crime. You go to jail for it.

And somehow he had gotten the transcripts of the grand jury.

So,

and clearly the mafia had bribed somebody to get that,

given it to the attorney. The attorney wouldn't tell where he got

it, but he was

facing criminal charges, also disbarment.

And in the middle of all that, he was somehow

appointed as Sirhan's attorney.

He told Sirhan to plead guilty.

If Sirhan had

pleaded innocent, there was no way that he could have gotten convicted

because the

bullets that were in his gun, the bullets that killed my

father did not match the ballistics of the bullets in his gun

or the bullets that hit the other eight people in the room. Cover up big time.

Wow.