I went to New Orleans last week got scammed by my hotel and came back with Covid.
Voodoo?
Of course it was different 60 years ago, and even more so when Lee was born in 1939, but the sight of cranes looming high along the Mississippi and of Lake Pontchartrain stretching forever at the same level you are traveling tells me that New Orleans is both timeless and out of time.
What to make of this mystic river port?
It is the thesis of my guide that Dallas was the crime scene but New Orleans was where the plot originated.
Motive and means were there, but, to jump to a conclusion, I believe it was just a piece. The key player here would be Carlos Marcello head of organized crime family covering a territory from New Orleans to Dallas.
Bobby Kennedy deported him to Guatemala. David Ferrie flew him back. Lee’s uncle Dutz Murret, ran numbers for Marcello.
The most interesting “tell” to support my guide’s thesis is the word ”patsy”. According to him this is mob slang not Intelligence Community slang. I have to think about that one.
I think we have to assume that Lee was familiar with the New Orleans underworld.
When Lee moved Marina down to New Orleans, in the Spring of 1963, she thought that the Murrets’ house was where they were going to stay. She was not happy that the apartment he had found for them at 4907 Magazine Street was dark and full of cockroaches.
It’s in much better shape today, there’s a picture below. It occurs to me that Lee exercised the same strategy in choosing this apartment that Allen Dulles did for his hq at home in Bern during WW2. Down a cul de sac, not easy for the world to see who is coming or going, very easy for Lee to see.
It is on Magazine Street. Get on a bus, ride five miles almost to Canal Street and you are within a five minute walk of all the documented places that Lee staged provocations. You are right outside the Reily Coffee Company where he worked for a while and you are right outside the Bannister offices, who presumably set up the provocations. You are also in the middle of the offices of the FBI, military intelligence and the CIA.
As best I can tell it was in a much better area and a much better structure than the ones that Marguerite and Lee struggled through in his youth. They were very poor.
My guide took me to every place Lee lived in New Orleans in his life. We were following a map created by the New Orleans Times Picayune. It is fascinating; I have included a copy below.
I am interested in Lee’s Murret connections. When he was very young, his mother, Marguerite, parked him with her sister Lillian Claverie Murret. Marilyn Dorothea Murret, her daughter, testified to the Warren Commission what a sweet young child he was. There are wiffs of suspicion that she introduced him to the Intelligence Community.
Her brother Eugene, studied for the priesthood with the Jesuits and invited Lee to address the seminarians on the differences between the Soviet and American economic and social systems. Lee drafted some notes for the speech that looked like he wanted to set the stage on fire, but by all accounts the speech was very bland.
As I’ve said, I’m dealing with Covid so I won’t try to go any deeper into things. Next week I will say a lot more about the Fair Play for Cuba Committee and maybe even a bit on my take of a mysterious woman named Judyth Vary Baker. Only in New Orleans could that story have been concocted.
- Robert
4907 Magazine Street - their apartment is entered by the door down the driveway. The address of the apartment in front is 4905 Magazine Street
©️ Robert Manz
The places Lee lived. The link to this online is all the way at the bottom of the page. Credit to Dan Swenson, Nola.com
Finally, my favorite picture from Iran pre-Khomeini.


Knotting a Persian Rug, Khorasan ©️Robert Manz
Next week- Fair Play for Cuba Committee
Key addresses
544 Camp
531 Lafayette
4907 Magazine (4905)
5101 Magazine (Henry’s)
111 Sherwood Forest
757 French Street
Lakeview
https://bloximages.newyork1.vip.townnews.com/nola.com/content/tncms/assets/v3/editorial/a/04/a048d09a-0d67-11ea-9eee-8bccb5e1e9c4/5dd846c55ba7e.pdf.pdf