Michele StuevenIn his explosive new book, Abuse of Power, former criminal defense attorney and TV network legal analyst Mark Shaw has unearthed new information he says confirms that Sirhan Sirhan was not accountable for the 1968 assassination of Robert F. Kennedy.
The bestselling author refutes Robert Kennedy Jr.’s theory that his father’s murder was linked to the CIA, but based on new evidence he’s uncovered, says the real mastermind and the one with the strongest motive to want RFK dead was New Orleans mafia don Carlos Marcello. Furthermore, the author suggests that Sirhan was recruited as a patsy to divert suspicions of Marcello’s involvement.
The result: for nearly 60 years, Sirhan has languished in a prison cell because, Shaw believes, he was denied justice from the moment he was arrested. While a parole board granted him parole in 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom reversed the decision in January 2022, citing that he still poses a threat to public safety.
“There are three true crime murder mysteries here that weren’t really mysteries at all,” Shaw tells LA Weekly in a phone call. “President John F. Kennedy, journalist Dorothy Kilgallen, and Robert Kennedy. It’s the first time anybody has put those in context. You’ve got JFK in ’63, Dorothy dying in ’65, and Bobby Kennedy in ’68. By doing so, you gain a different perspective on what happened, as they are all interconnected. Dorothy’s death was kind of the lynchpin between the two Kennedys.”
Based on Shaw’s nearly 15 years of extensive research, the book exposes, for the first time, the connection between the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and the mysterious death of the famous journalist and close Kennedy friend Dorothy Kilgallen, with Marcello as the culprit for each.
Shaw goes on to say that the Louisiana mafia don used patsies to cover his complicity, a pattern that had never been revealed before. For Shaw, the key to this conclusion is an FBI file transcript of an audiotaped confession Marcello made to a fellow inmate at a Texas federal prison on December 15, 1985. While expressing his intense dislike of the former president, Marcello confided, “Yeah, I had the son of a bitch killed. I’m glad I did it. I’m sorry I couldn’t have done it myself.”
The book takes a detailed dive into the 24-year-old Sirhan’s life leading up to the assassination.
Sirhan Sirhan mug shot (Courtesy Mark Shaw)
“I began by looking at Sirhan more than anything,” Shaw says. “I was able to find information about him, what he was doing at the time, and a year before the assassination. My aha moment was finding this videotaped interview with John Shear, a paddock captain at Santa Anita racetrack, who hired Sirhan Sirhan when he came in looking for a job. This small man came in looking for work, and the only thing he had was for a hot walker, somebody who walks the horses after the race and pays $200 a month. He said he’d take it. Shear said he got to know Sirhan Sirhan, who was easily manipulated. He was a hard worker and a very meek individual. He had some gambling debts. He wanted to be a jockey, but he was too big.
“Just before Bobby Kennedy was killed in 1968, Sirhan Sirhan happened to be across town at the Hollywood Park race track wearing a brand new suit and looking like he had come into money,” Shaw continues. “ He had two, what were described by Shear as hombres or underworld characters, on each side of him, guiding him along. That bothered him, because it didn’t seem like he was under his own power.”
On the day RFK was killed, Shear saw Sirhan’s mugshot on TV, asking if anyone knew him; they were still trying to figure out who he was. At the urging of his wife, he called the authorities at Hollywood Park and told them the whole story about Sirhan, and gave him the impression that they would pass it along to the LAPD and the FBI and get back in touch with him. While John Shear has passed, his brother Michael has been a direct source to the author.
Carlos Marcello (Courtesy Mark Shaw)
And that’s where Shaw says the abuse of power started.
“They never contacted him, but the kicker there was that for about the next year, every time Shear or his wife picked up the telephone, they’d hear a click. They knew their phones had been tapped. I found a verifiable local article that stated that LA mobster Mickey Cohen would host gambling poker parties at the Ambassador Hotel and knew the workings and the layout of the hotel. So he would know exactly what Robert Kennedy was going to do that day he won the California primary and where he would be. Sirhan had four $100 bills in his pocket when he was arrested. The man was destitute. Where did that come from? Then they got him a mafia lawyer. He never got adequate representation.”
One of Shaw’s goals in the book is to get Sirhan out of prison. He delivered a letter this week to RFK Jr. and has been in touch with Sirhan’s representative.
“There’s a verified account that he went to the prison and hugged Sirhan and said, ‘I know you didn’t kill my father,” says Shaw, who has written numerous books on the JFK assassination. “ He’s gone out on a limb and said I don’t want the wrong man convicted. I’m going to test him by sending this letter and see if he can steer the president of the United States into providing Sirhan Sirhan with a pardon. And this is a pardon that makes sense. We have new ballistics tests in the book. The bullets go into the shoulder and back of Robert Kennedy. There are a lot of discrepancies. “