Assassination of Bob Marley

[UniverseSeven]

The Wailers


The Martyr & The Madman

I saw Bob Marley, live in concert at the Glasgow Apollo and again at Crystal Palace in 1980 on the Uprising Tour, just before he died, where he opened his set with; "sun is shining, the weather is sweet" and it was...He cast a mystical, tranquil spell over his many adoring fans that day.

Bob Marley's unique brand of reggae music, revering Ras Tafari, Emperor of Ethiopia, as the living King of Kings and Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, resounded throughout the known world and struck a cord within oppressed peoples from the Bronx to Botswana and the jungles of Borneo.

On the day he passed on to the spiritual motherland, Holy Mount Zion, an enormous peal of thunder indicated that a great soul had departed this Earth and a bolt of lightning rent the darkened skies...The flash lit up my room and illuminated Bob's picture on the wall, his friends Neville Garrick and Judy Mowatt described an identical experience in Jamaica. Bob was dead and I was desolate, but his mission was complete and he had encouraged many to reject the trappings of Babylon.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God, but the warmongers are most threatened by the people's champions and as a result, they often meet a premature and mysterious end, like Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Lee and John Lennon. Bob Marley was no exception. When Bob fell ill in 1980, after his last performance at Madison Square Garden, he was diagnosed as suffering from exhaustion, but within a year, he was dead at the age of thirty-six, riddled with cancer in his lungs, stomach and brain.

Lew Lee, a documentary filmmaker said; "People came by his house. There were always people going in and out. Someone gave Bob a pair of boots. He put his foot in and said "Ow!" A friend got in there - you know how Jamaicans are. He said, "let's get in here" - in the boot, and he pulled a piece of copper wire out. It was embedded in the boot." The assumption is it was radioactive because Marley later broke his toe playing soccer in London and when the bone wouldn't mend, the doctors found that the toe had cancer.

The cancer metastasised throughout his entire body, but Bob believed he could fight this thing. He wanted to do anything but to turn to Western medicine, however he rapidly deteriorated and had a slight stroke. At the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Institute, the chemotherapy itself seemed to be killing him, so, innocently he handed himself over to struggle with the disease for eight months at the 'alternative' clinic of Dr. Joseph Issels in Bavaria, who was considered a quack by the American Cancer Society. Lew claims; "Dr. Issels said that he could cure Bob.

They cut Bob's dreadlocks off and he was getting all of this crazy, crazy (experimental) medical treatment in Switzerland. I know this because of Ray Von Evans, who played in Marley's group, we were very close friends. As Bob was receiving these medical treatments, Ray would come by every two or three months and told me, "Yeah, mon, they're killing Bob. They are KILLING Bob." I said, "What do you mean they are killing Bob?" "No, no, mon," he said. "Dis Dr. Issels, he's a Nazi!"

During Bob's stay at Dr. Joseph Issels clinic in Bad Wiesse, he was subjected to blood transfusions, hyperthermia and illegal injections of THX. He was put on a restricted diet until he weighed only five stones, his friends who found his weight loss alarming, felt the treatment was "breaking down Bob's physical structure."

But a very 'telling' conversation took place when Dr. Issels told Bob a story about a German friend who had advised Issels not to treat him, saying that Marley was the most dangerous black man on the planet. A strange (Nazi) acquaintance for an eminent doctor? Not really, Joseph Issels was an officer in the SS, a colleague of Joseph Mengele and had served a jail term for manslaughter. Mengele survived the war and enjoyed the protection and employment of the CIA.

Bob himself sometimes felt the injections he was given were poison, and in bad moments thought they were trying to kill him. When Bob was too ill to continue treatment and Issels sent him home to die, he kissed his teeth bitterly and said softly, "Dr. Issels is a madman." Robert Nesta Marley, the King of Reggae, had been at the pinnacle of his career and was in danger of inciting peace and unity when he died of cancer in a Miami hospital on Monday May 11, 1981.

This could be the first trumpet
Might as well be the last
Many more will have to suffer
Many more will have to die...

But the National Security Act of 1947, the CIA charter, does not grant national security thugs and Nazi doctors a license to kill. Who the cap fits, let them wear it.

Orgonegal

[UniverseSeven]

"Bob Marley: Blunt Questions" By: I. Jabulani Tafari





“Rasta don’t work for no CIA”

Did the CIA really kill Bob Marley? How’s that for a Blunt Question? This is only one of many Blunt Questions that remain unanswered nearly 22 years after Bob Marley’s translation from this world into another dimension.

When the newz broke in Jamaica on May 11, 1981, that Bob Marley had passed on from this world at the Cedars of Lebanon Hospital in Miami, the immediate and initial response by politically savvy Rastafarians in Jamaica was that the Reggae Maestro had been murdered, or more correctly, assassinated! At the time, the Rastas didn’t know exactly who, when, where or how, but they knew enough to suspect foul play with extreme prejudice. Of course, anyone who heard that reasoning, scoffed at it. After all, everyone knows that cancer is a fatal disease, and Bob had it and died from it and that’s a great pity… but murdered? How ridiculous! Maybe, or maybe not. Not when you stop and really think about it. Who would want to? Who would be able to and how could it be done so skillfully without suspicion?

It’s almost like the classic scenario that Detective Lieutenant Columbo of TV fame, would stumble and fumble his bumbling way into. Only to find that the seemingly straight forward ‘death by natural causes’, was really the ‘perfect murder’ in disguise. After all, who ever would even suspect the possibility of something as bizarre as that occurring? So for the past 20 years, music lovers around the world have been mourning the ‘untimely’ passing of Bob Marley, accepting that the Reggae Legend died of ‘natural causes’ (really unnatural, because what’s ‘natural’ about cancer?) Thus, as we move swiftly into a new millennium and an impending New World Order, a mounting body of information is seriously suggesting that Bob Marley was the victim of an elaborate assassination scheme that resulted him being literally ‘taken out’ –right there in broad daylight on center stage before the eyes of the whole world.





Since the late 1970’s and on into the early 1980’s, the New York City and Houston, Texas, Police Departments have led the way in compiling official reports on the Rastafari Movement. The NYPD in particular, not only described Rastafarians as dangerous, gun-shooting, drug-dealing, criminal Jamaican Posse members, but actually profiled and described dreadlocked Rastas as “terrorists”. The largest police operation in the history of Washington DC, ‘Operation Caribbean Cruise’ back in the late 1980’s, was designed to prove once and for all the drug-dealing, gun-running connection between Rastafarians and the Jamaican criminal posses that were said to be even more ruthless and trigger happy than the Italian Mafia and Organized Crime. “Operation Caribbean Cruise’ never made the nightly news outside of DC, because the police dragnet came up empty…. But for about five guns (not the high powered automatic weapons anticipated) and a minimal amount of drugs.

Despite these failed attempts to tarnish and taint the reputation of the Rastafari Kulcha, Bob Marley and Peter Tosh continued leading the way for a world wide revolution in thinking and thought. Their militant brand of hardcore Rootz Reggae was revolutionary in its impact. The Word Sound & Power of their Muzik, inspired political, economic, social and religious changes all over the globe. The anti-apartheid movement in South Africa drew inspiration from Marley Muzik; the Zimbabwean freedom fighters engaged in a guerrilla struggle against Ian Smith’s colonial Rhodesian settler regime, drew inspiration from Marley Muzik; even young, rich White kids in America from name-brand families were starting to hang out at Wailers concerts, were starting to dig the message in Marley’s muzik and were becoming inspired to work for social change and to “Chant Down Babylon” That was motive enough for Marley’s murder.

Marley was succeeding in a rhythmic revolution that utilized music as a more efficient tool than guns and bombs. Bob Marley, his mere personae, his instantly and internationally recognized image and look, his use and promotion of the “Wisdom Weed’, his verbal and material support of global Pan-African Liberation, and the fact that Bob Marley had become a millionaire –a Black Jamaican-born, pro-African, independent-thinking millionaire Rastaman- who could now put his own money where his mouth was and finance whatever project he wanted to… All of these factors made Bob Marley a very serious threat to the North American status quo and to the hidden power brokers trying to implement their plan for a New World Order.

By 1980, Bob Marley was the most popular ‘Third World’ muzik star on the planet and his immense influence was growing geometrically. The final straw that prompted clandestine covert operations against Marley was probably when Bob put the immortal words of HIM Emperor Haile Selassie I to muzik in the brilliant composition entitled “War”. When they heard: “Until the color of a man’s skin makes no more significance than the color of his eyes, there will be war… Until there are no first or second class citizens of any nation - war… Until the ignoble and unhappy regimes that hold our brothers in Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, have been toppled and utterly destroyed - War. And until bigotry, prejudice and malicious and inhuman self interest have been replaced by tolerance, understanding and good will… everywhere is war.” When the CIA types heard that song, they brought in the heavyweights and the battle went to another dimension. Unfortunately, Bob Marley never really knew that he had already been “Marked For Death”. And as Del Jones chronicles inhis “Culture Bandits” series of books, Bob was soon eradicated as a revolutionary 3rd World Icon and replaced in the early 1980’s by an androgynous (blurred gender), surgically altered, cosmetically bleached Michael Jackson.

O.K., so now you agree that they had a reason and a motive to kill Marley, but now you’re wondering, how could they give him cancer? According to the popular version of events, Bob is supposed to have contracted cancer after bruising his toe and losing a toe-nail while playing soccer in France in 1977. In his revealing book, “Marley And Me”, former Wailers manager Don Taylor notes that an unknown doctor came and gave Bob a still unknown injection in his toe right after the ball game was interrupted Malignant cancer, originating in the same toe, was diagnosed some time after. But the origin of the melanoma (the most virulent and deadly kind of cancer found in Humans) that took Bob’s life, may be concealed in little known events that took place at an even earlier time.





In a very interesting cover article published in the February 2002 issue of High Times magazine, the authors disclose that in 1976, Carl Colby, son of ex-CIA Director William Colby, visited the Hope Road home of Marley and gave the Reggae Star a gift in the form of a pair of boots. The High Times article quotes eyewitnesses as saying that Bob cried out “Ow!” when he stuck a foot in one of the boots. Something had jucked (stuck) him in the toe(s). Talk about being aware or beware of “Greeks baring gifts”. Subsequent investigation of the boot by hand, retrieved a piece of copper wire that had been sticking up inside the footwear. Entitled, “Chanting Down Babylon: The CIA and the Death of Bob Marley”, the High Times article went on to pose another Blunt Question: had the copper wire found in Bob’s new boot been chemically treated with a carcinogenic toxin? There is no doubting that with today’s technology, carcinogenic (that is cancer-causing) substances can be introduced into the human body very easily by a variety of means. By food, drink, smoke, sex, a pin/wire prick, or with the spike of an umbrella.

As the High Times article also observed, 1976 was a time when Jamaica, under the leadership of the Democratic Socialist and pro-Castro Prime Minister Michael Manley, was known to be under direct destabilization efforts by the CIA. According to High Times, Marley and Tosh as Reggae musicians, were targeted in particular because they were using their music to alert the Jamaican people to the dangers of the ongoing CIA covert operations. The visit to Marley by Carl Colby, who was supposedly posing as a member of a foreign film crew, took place a week after the “Ambush In the Night” during which Bob and Rita Marley and Don Taylor were all shot and wounded during the first upfront assassination attempt. Most people took that attack as involving only local partisan politics, with the opposition JLP not wanting Marley & the Wailers to perform at the PNP-Government sponsored and free Smile Jamaica concert days before a hotly contested General Election in Jamaica in December 1976. Marley appeared and performed for a mostly inner-city, urban audience on the Smile Jamaica Concert in the National Heroes Circle, in spite of the gun attack.

At the other, final end of this melodrama, we find Dr. Josef Issels, the supposedly holistic immuno-therapist who treated Bob in Germany after his collapse in Central Park, New York, in late 1980. Information is coming to light that Issels is an ex-Nazi doctor who may be implicated in some of the more nefarious practices associated with German medical studies and practices from the Hitler era. This may explain the painful, starvation-diet based treatment program inflicted on Bob by Dr. Issels. So we want to know: Who exactly is this Dr. Josef Issels? Does he indeed have a Nazi past? And what precisely did his ‘unorthodox’ cancer treatment entail? These Blunt Questions also need Blunt Answers.





At the end of the day and at the end of this article, we’re basically at the same place we were when we started. Just like the following truism indicates: “There are more questions than answers”. Nevertheless, muzik fans and people of good will owe it to themselves and to Bob Marley, to continue asking these Blunt Questions, and should demand that answers be given by the powers that be and those in the know. In the meantime, the final Blunt Question for all of you reading this, is: Bob Marley was willing to get up and pay the price for Standing Up for his Rights and for seeking Liberation from political and mental slavery for his people. Are you?

www.rootzreggae.com/Rootz-Reggae/MarleyBluntQuestions.htm

[UniverseSeven]

Operation Chaos

WHO'S NEXT?: CIA Killings of American and British Rock Musicians,1968-1998

by Alex Constantine

Research assistance: The late Mae Brussell's "Operation CHAOS," an unpublished essay, and film-maker Lew Lee.


Reports of appalling excesses committed by domestic intelligence operatives during the Vietnam era have surfaced repeatedly in the public print since the evacuation of Saigon: the FBI's COINTELPRO outrages, the probable involvement of military intelligence officers in the murder of Martin Luther King, et.al,, assaults on 1960s activism by the CIA's CHAOS division, the distribution of LSD to subvert the anti-war movement, a litany of Watergate "horrors" and various ill-conceived, federally-sanctioned undercover operations. Some of this closet activity has only come to light decades later, including the existence of a CIA-led "Sovereign Committee," an assemblage of prominent reactionaries bent on turning back the civil rights movement in the South of the 1960s by decimating the lives of its leading spokesmen.

Still eclipsed by federal classification are the tactics of the U.S. intelligence sector in the destabilization of the lives of musicians and counter-cultural activists, as revealed in a Senate Intelligence Committee report released on April 26, 1976:

"Show them as scurrilous and depraved. Call attention to their habits and living conditions, explore every possible embarrassment. Send in women and sex, break up marriages. Have members arrested on marijuana charges. Investigate personal conflicts or animosities between them. Send articles to the newspapers showing their depravity. Use narcotics and free sex to entrap. Use misinformation to confuse and disrupt. Get records of their bank accounts. Obtain specimens of handwriting. Provoke target groups into rivalries that MAY RESULT IN DEATH."

Killing was, without question, deemed a sound option by an intelligence sector embroiled in suppressing the popular backlash to military-industrial authority. One covert operation proposed by the President Nixon's Plumbers unit,, a CIA cadré, involved the bombing of 100,000 demonstrators at a rock concert in Mission Bay, San Diego during the 1972 Republican convention (an event subsequently moved to Miami, where the same White House special operations unit planned to provoke a riot to be blamed on the Left, per Harper's magazine for December 1972, until the whistle was blown by FBI informant and Green Beret vet William Lemmer before a Florida grand jury).

The music industry of the Vietnam period was the binding force of a cultural revolution. Music and the politics of the Left were one. "War," Mick Jagger reflected, "stems from power mad politicians and patriots. Some new master plan would end all these mindless men from seats of power." Mick Jagger's audience sang his revulsion, but their enmity toward the warfare state was mutual.

The back channels of the intelligence world swarmed with crooks and killers. This genré belched forth the late Robert Hall, associate of Robert Vesco and Howard Hughes, a private investigator in L.A. summed up by former Harper's editor Jim Hougan: "tough, reasonably brave and decidedly larcenous ... a father, a wiretapper, an informer, a dope peddler and a double agent" (Spooks, William Morrow, 1878).

Hall tailed Sal Mineo one evening in 1975 ... the very night the actor was stabbed to death. (Mineo's had signed on to play Sirhan Sirhan in a film about the murder of Robert F. Kennedy - in it, CIA assassination and post-hypnotic programming were to be prominently featured themes.)

Hall was retained by the managers of seven rock bands to investigate physicians who'd slipped their musicians fraudulent prescriptions, drugs that altered their personalities, sabotaged public appearances, hindered their lives and music.

Hall reported that two doctors and a dentist had prescribed the mind-altering drugs. This information was turned over to the authorities. No action was taken. Hall was gunned down shortly thereafter, on July 22, 1976. The homicide investigation turned up tapes recorded by Robert Hall. Beverly Hills Police Chief Jack Eggars immediately resigned due to his involvement with the drug dealer, as revealed in the tapes. The media, observed the late political researcher Mae Brussell, linked the killing to "Hollywood's most famous celebrities in drug and sex scandals, exposures of television starts and high Washington officials, drug traffic from Los Angeles to the Malibu community, international sports events, the Los Angeles police department (one of their former agents is now retired, and heads the Police Science Department at L.A. Valley College and supplied the fatal weapon used to kill Hall)."

Jack Ginsburgs, Hall's partner, was charged with the murder. Ginsburgs, according to Hougan, was "a pornographer, the proprietor of XXX, Inc. The son of a White Russian émigré, he'd spent his youth inside the decadent Shanghai Bund - that romantic foreign colony which [was] a meld of opium, kinky sex and intrigue." Gene LeBell was also charged. LeBell, another partner in Hall's firm, owned a pharmacy in Hollywood.

Between 1967 and 1976, many of the music industry's most politically active talents died, among them Mama Cass Elliott, folk singers Richard Farina, Phil Ochs and Tim Buckley, Jim and Pamela Morrison, Gram Parsons, Otis Redding, songwriter Jimmy Reed, Clarence White of the Byrds, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead's "Pig Pen," Jimi Hendrix, Michael Jeffrey (Hendrix's manager), Keith Moon, others. Since, the deaths of John Lennon and Bob Marley were succeeded by books exploring the possible involvement of the CIA.

Operation Chaos (forthcoming), will examine evidence of complicity by the intelligence "services" - recruiters of morally-erosive holdouts of fascist regimes and Mafia stinkbugs - in the deaths of over a dozen musicians associated with the "New Left," among them:

Brian Jones: The coroner's report concluded, "death by misadventure" on July 2, 1969. the Rolling Stone complained that police planted marijuana on him, and he compared his handling by the law to the hounding of Lenny Bruce, recalling the tactics detailed in the 1976 Congressional Intelligence Committee report. Two books published in 1994, Paint It Black by Geoffrey Guiliano and Terry Rawlings' Who Killed Christopher Robin?, concluded that Jones had been murdered. England's Independent reported on April 4, 1994, "Murder Claims Raise Doubts Over Rolling Stone's Death." The 27-year-old guitarist may have been "deliberately drowned in the swimming pool of his country mansion by one of his aides, Frank Thorogood." The books cited above are in agreement that before Jones drowned, Thorogood conned the musician out of thousands of pounds. Was Thorogood a contract killer?

Keith Richards: "Some very weird things happened the night Brian died. We had these chauffeurs working for us, and we tried to find out. Some of them had a weird hold over Brian. I got straight into it and wanted to know who was there and couldn't find out. The only cat I could ask was the one I think who got rid of everybody, and did a whole disappearing thing so that when the cops arrived, it was just an accident."

Phil Ochs: Wrote songs condemning war. In 1974 he sang at Madison Square Garden with Bob Dylan, the occasion: "An Evening with Salvadore Allendé." The death of Phil Ochs was determined to be "death by hanging" in April, 1976. Two years before, he'd had a bout of depression and bizarre behavior that left him with a multiple personality, a psychological state much explored by the CIA's mind control community.

Richard Farina: Married Mimi Baez, sister of Joan Baez - to the national security state born. Joan Baez wrote in her autobiography, And a Voice to Sing With (Signet, 1987), that when she was a young girl, "most of the bright young Stanford scientists went off to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was being developed. My father recognized the potential destructive power of the unleashed atom even in those early days. So he took a job as a research physicist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York." Cornell was the home base of the CIA's mind control experiments, and Joan Baez is a self-described survivor of ritual child abuse, which employs a form of mind control, trauma-based programming, a technique perfected by the CIA. "Soon my father was invited to become Head of Operations Research at Cornell. Exactly what the job entailed was classified information, but he was offered a three-week cruise on an aircraft carrier as an introduction to the project and promised a huge salary. As it turned out, he would be overseeing Project Portrex, a vast amphibious exercise which among other things involved testing fighter jets, then a relatively new phenomenon. Millions of dollars would be poured into the project, about which he was to know little and say less." Farina, who had married into a CIA family, was killed in a motorcycle crash. According to the sleeve of his last record, "Goldwater was about to win the California primary and the skies were somewhat uneasy."

Jimi Hendrix: From the Sunday Telegraph, December 12, 1993: "The former girlfriend of Jimi Hendrix, the rock guitarist, spoke for the first time yesterday about how she has succeeded in reopening the investigation into his drug-related death 23 years ago.

"Kathy Etchingham has spent the past three years - almost as long as she was Hendrix's live-in lover - investigating the circumstances surrounding the star's death. A 34-page dossier she sent to Sir Nicholas Lyell, the attorney-general, has prompted Scotland Yard to reopen the case and may lead to a new inquest. In it she pointed to alleged inconsistencies in statements given by Monika Dannemann, a German blonde who was Hendrix's girlfriend at the time of his death.... The police will examine whether there was any delay in calling an ambulance for Hendrix....

"Etchingham, 46, now married and a mother of two, said: At the time of his death I didn't doubt what I was told. But then I began reading the biographies and seeing interviews and I could see gaping holes."

Mama Cass Elliott: Count in her entourage at the time of her death one Bill Mentzer, since convicted for the murder of fledgling Hollywood producer Roy Radin. Mentzer was convicted with an accomplice, Alex Marti, former leader of an Argentine death squad, to life in prison. Cass had recently finished two weeks at the London Palladium. The coroner's report was not conclusive. She "probably choked to death," but there was "a possibility of heart attack."

Bob Marley: After the last performance of Bob Marley and the Wailers in America, at Madison Square Garden, Marley took seriously ill. Three years before, in London, the singer had injured a toe in a football match. The toe was found to be cancerous, and Marley was treated in Miami, Florida with no success. By 1980, the growth had infected his entire body. He struggled with the disease for eight months at the clinic of Dr. Joseph Issels in Bavaria. Dr. Issels' brand of alternative medicine was non-toxic. For a brief time Bob's condition appeared to stabilize. Eventually, however, the battle proved too much. He died in a Miami hospital on Monday May 11, 1981. Excerpt of an interview with Lew Lee, a documentary filmmaker (the Oscar-winning Panama Deception and All Power to the People, an examination of the FBI's COINTELPRO excesses), conducted on October 30, 1997.

LEE: People came by his house. There were always people going in and out. Someone gave Bob a pair of boots. He put his foot in and said "Ow!" A friend got in there - you know how Jamaicans are. He said,"let's get in here" - in the boot, and he pulled a piece of copper wire out. It was embedded in the boot.

A.C.: Do you believe it was radioactive?

LEE: I didn't think so at the time, but I've always had my suspicions because Marley later broke his toe playing soccer, and when the bone wouldn't mend, the doctors found that the toe had cancer. The cancer metastasized throughout his body, and he [Marley] believed he could fight this thing. He wanted to do anything but to turn to Western medicine. This may have been a mistake, maybe not. So they appointed for Bob - Chris Blackwell, I guess, and a couple of other people - they found this doctor is Switzerland, Dr. Issels, who said that he could cure Bob. And they cut Bob's dreadlocks off. And he was getting all of this crazy, crazy medical treatment in Switzerland. I know this because Ray Von Evans, who played in Marley's grounp, we were very close friends. As Bob was receiveing these medical treatments, Ray would come by every two or three months - 1979-80 - and told me, "Yeah, mon,They're killing Bob. They are KILLING Bob." I said, "What do you mean 'they are killing Bob?'" "No, no, mon," he said. "Dis Dr. Issels, he's a Nazi!" We found out later that Dr. Issels WAS a Nazi doctor. And he had worked with Dr. [Joseph] Mengele.

Mengele survived the war and enjoyed the protection and employment of the CIA. On five occasions his death has been reported. Attempts to bring the facts to light have been subverted by employees of the Agency. John Lennon: British barrister Fenton Bresler has long maintained that the Beatle's murder was the result of CIA mind control programming. In Who Killed John Lennon? (1989), Bresler observed: "What really got the FBI and CIA so geared up about Lennon was [his plan] for a 'revolutionary road show,' starring Lennon and Yoko. This combination of rock music and radical politics was to barnstorm its way across America." Did a programmed killer abort the said barnstorm? The FBI has long resisted all efforts by Jon Weiner, a professor at the university of California, Irvine, to lay hands on Lennon's file, which remains top secret. Why?

The mystery of Lennon's death - and unresolved circumstances in a score of others (the theft and burning of Byrd guitarist Clarence White's corpse by a Manson Family member, for one) - could well be dispelled by access to sealed files. The National Security Act of 1947, the CIA charter, does not grant national security thugs a license to kill.


www.konformist.com/rocknroll/chaos.htm

[UniverseSeven]

Down Babylon: The CIA & the Death of Bob Marley

BOB MARLEY worked tirelessly in spreading reggae music and the message of rastafari worldwide. Through his work, he gave the world profound and beautiful music.

By Alex Constantine

Did a soccer accident really cause Bob Marley¹s death, as has been widely reported? Or was the dark hand of CIA covert operations behind the death of the greatest countercultural prophet of our time?

"Ambush in the night, all guns aiming at me
Ambush in the night, they opened fire on me
Ambush in the night, protected by His Majesty..."
Bob Marley

Marley knew the drill in Jamaica, at the height of his success, when music and politics were still one, before the fog of censorship rolled into the island, old wounds were opened by a wave of destabilization politics. Stories appeared in the local, regional and international press down-sizing the achievements of the quasi-socialist Jamaican government under Prime Minister Michael Manley. In the late 1970s, the island was flooded with cheap guns, heroin, cocaine, right-wing propaganda, death squad rule, and as Grenada¹s Prime Minister Maurice Bishop described it three years later, the CIA¹s "pernicious attempts [to] wreck the [Jamaican] economy."

"Destabilization," Bishop told the emergent New Jewel Party, "is the name given the most recently developed method of controlling and exploiting the lives and resources of a country and its people by a bigger and more powerful country through bullying, intimidation and violence." In response to the fascistic machinations of the CIA, Marley wove his lyrics into a revolutionary crucifix to ward off the cloak-and-dagger "vampires" descending upon the island. June 1976: then Jamaican Governor-General Florizel Glasspole placed Jamaica under martial law to stanch the bloody pre-election violence. The People¹s National Party (PNP) asked the Wailers to play at the Smile Jamaica concert in December. Despite the rising political mayhem, he agreed to perform.

In late November, a death squad slipped beneath the gates at Marley¹s Hope Road home. As Marley biographer Timothy White tells it, at about 9 p.m., "the torpor of the quiet tropical night was interrupted by a queer noise that was not quite like a firecracker." Marley was in the kitchen at the rear of the house eating a grapefruit when he heard the bursts of automatic gunfire. Don Taylor, Marley¹s manager, had been talking to the musician when the bullets ripped through the back of his legs. Taylor fell but remained conscious with four bullets in his legs and one buried at the base of his spine.

The men were "peppering the house with a barrage of rifle and pistol fire, shattering windows and splintering plaster and woodwork on the first floor." Rita, trying to escape with Marley¹s children and a reporter from the Jamaican Daily News, was shot by one of the men in the front yard. The bullet caught her in the head, lifting her off her feet as it burrowed between scalp and skull. Meanwhile, a man with an automatic rifle had burst through the back door off the pantry, pushing past a fleeing Seeco Patterson to aim beyond Don Taylor at Bob Marley.... The gunman got off eight shots. One bullet struck a counter, another buried itself in the ceiling and five tore into Don Taylor. The last creased Marley¹s breast below his heart and drilled deep into his arm.

The survival of the raggae singer and his entire entourage appeared to be the work of Rasta. "The firepower these guys apparently brought with them was immense," Wailer publicist Jeff Walker recalls. "There were bullet holes everywhere. In the kitchen, the bathroom, the living room, floors, ceilings, doorways and outside."

There has since been widespread belief that the CIA arranged the hit on Hope Road. Neville Garrick, a student of Angela Davis and art director of the Jamaica Daily News, took photos of Kingston, Nassau and the Hope Road enclave before and after the shooting. Garrick had film of "suspicious characters" lurking near the house before the assassination attempt. The day of the shooting, he had snapped some photos of Marley standing beside a Volkswagen in a pool of Mango shade. The strangers made Marley nervous; he told Garrick that they appeared to be "scouting" the property. In the prints, however, their features were too blurred by shadow to make out. After the concert, Garrick took the photographs and prints to Nassau. Sadly, while the Wailers and crew prepared to board a flight to London, Garrick discovered that the film had been stolen.

Many of the CIA¹s files on Bob Marley remain classified to the present day. However, on December 5, a week after the assault on Hope Road, the Wailers¹ appeared at the Smile Jamaica fest despite their bullet wounds to perform one long, defiant anthem of rage directed at the CIA ‹ "War"‹suggesting the Wailers¹ own attitude toward the "vampires" from Langley:

Until the ignoble and unhappy regimes
That now hold our brothers
In Angola, in Mozambique,
South Africa
In subhuman bondage
Have been toppled,
Utterly destroyed,
Everywhere is war...





Only a handful of Marley¹s most trusted comrades knew of the band¹s whereabouts before the festival. Yet a member of the film crew, or so he claimed‹reportedly, he didn¹t have a camera‹managed to talk his way past macheté-bearing Rastas to enter the Hope Road encampment: one Carl Colby, son of the late CIA director William Colby.

While the band prepared for the concert, a gift was delivered, according to a witness at the enclave‹a new pair of boots for Bob Marley. Former Los Angeles cinematographer Lee Lew-Lee (his camera work can be seen in the Oscar-winning documentary The Panama Deception) was close friends with members of the Wailers, and he believes that Marley¹s cancer can be traced to the boots: "He put his foot in and said, ŒOw!¹ A friend got in there ... he said, Œlet¹s [get] in the boot, and he pulled a length of copper wire out‹it was embedded in the boot."

Had the wire been treated chemically with a carcinogenic toxin? The appearance of Colby at Marley¹s compound was certainly provocative. (And so was Colby¹s subsequent part in the fall of another black cultural icon, O.J. Simpson, nearly 20 years later. At Simpson¹s preliminary hearing in 1995, Colby‹who resided next door to Nicole Simpson on Gretna Green Way in Brentwood, a mile from her reisidence on Bundy‹and his wife both took the stand to testify for the prosecution that Nicole¹s ex-husband had badgered and threatened her. Colby¹s testimony was instrumental in the formal charge of murder filed against Simpson and the nationally-televised fiasco known as the "Trial of the Century.")

Ten years after the Hope Road assault, Don Taylor published a memoir, Marley & Me, in which he alleges that a "senior CIA agent" had been planted among the crew as part of the plan to "assassinate" Marley. It¹s possible that this lapse in security allowed Colby entrance to the compound. It¹s clear that the CIA wanted Marley out of the picture. After the assassination attempt, a rumour circulated that the CIA was going to finish Marley off. The source of the rumor was the Agency itself.

The Wailers had set out on a world tour, and CIA agents informed Marley that should he return to Jamaica before the election, he would be murdered. Don Taylor and others close to Marley suspect that it was more than a threat. Lew-Lee recalls: "I didn¹t think so at the time, but I¹ve always had my suspicions because Marley later broke his toe playing soccer, and when the bone wouldn¹t mend the doctors found that the toe had cancer. The cancer metastasized throughout his body, but [Marley] believed he could fight this thing."

British researcher Michael Conally observes: "They certainly had reasons for wanting to. For one, Marley¹s highly charged message music made him an important figure that the rest of the world was beginning to notice. It was an influence that was hard to ignore least of all because everywhere you went you saw middle and upper class white people sprouting dreadlocks, smoking spliffs and adopting the Rastafarian lifestyle. This sort of thing didn¹t sit well with traditionalists and authoritarian types."

The soccer game took place in Paris ... five months after the boot incident. Marley took to the field with one of the leading teams in the country to break the monotony of the Wailers¹ Exodus tour. His right toe was injured in a tackle. The toenail came off. At first, it wasn¹t considered a serious wound.

But it would not heal. Marley was limping by July and consulted a physician, who was shocked by the toe¹s appearance. It was so eaten away that doctors in London advised it be amputated. Marley¹s religion forbade it: "Rasta no abide amputation," he insisted. He told the physician, "de living God, His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Ras Tafari, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah ... He will heal me wit¹ de meditations of me ganja chalice." No scalpel, he said, "will crease me flesh.... C¹yant kill Rasta. Rastamon live out."

He flew to Miami and Dr. William Bacon performed a skin graft on the lesion. The disease lingered undiagnosed and spread throughout his body. Isaac Ferguson, a friend and devotee, observed the slow death of Bob Marley first-hand. In the five years separating soccer injury from cancer diagnosis, Marley remained immersed in music, "ignoring the advice of doctors and close associates that he stop and obtain a thorough medical examination." He refused to give up recording and touring long enough to consult a doctor. Marley "would have to quit the stage and it would take years to recoup the momentum.

This was his time and he seized upon it. Whenever he went into the studio to record, he did enough for two albums. Marley would drink his fish tea, eat his rice-and-peas stew, roll himself about six spliffs and go to work. With incredible energy and determination, he kept strumming his guitar, maybe 12 hours, sometimes till daybreak." Reggae artist Jimmy Cliff observed after Marley¹s death: "What I know now is that Bob finished all he had to do on this earth." Marley was aware by 1977 that he was dying and set out to condense a lifetime of music into the few years remaining.

The CIA Rocks Trenchtown
In 1975, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, on a diplomatic junket to the island, had assured Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley in a private meeting that there was "no attempt now underway involving covert actions against the Jamaican government." But in the real world something of a Caribbean pogrom was underway, overseen, of course, by the CIA. As Kissinger croaked his denials to Manley, the destabilization push was already afoot.

The emphasis at this stage was on psychological operations but in the election year of 1976 a series of covert interventions‹employing arson, bombing and assassination as required‹completely disrupted Manley¹s democratic socialist rule. An arsenal of automatic weapons somehow found their way to Jamaica.

The CIA¹s thugs, directed by a growing coven of pin-striped officers reporting to the American embassy in Kingston, quietly organized secret police cadrés to stoke political violence. Huge consignments of guns and advanced communications gear were smuggled onto the island. One such shipment was intercepted by Manley¹s security patrols‹a caché of 500 man-eating submachine guns.

The firearms were shipped to the island from Miami by the Jamaica Freedom League, a right-wing paramilitary faction with roots in Langley, financed largely by drugs. Peter Whittington, the group¹s second-in-command, was convicted of drug trafficking in Dade County. The funds were laundered by the League at Miami¹s Bank of Perrine, the key American subsidiary of Castle Bank, then the CIA¹s financial base in Latin America. The bank was owned and operated by Paul Helliwell, bagman for the Bay of Pigs invasion, accused even by the conservative Wall Street Journal of involvement in the global narcotics trade.

A paramilitary force was mustered to quell the Rastafarian backlash, and the inevitable CIA-trained Cuban exiles beached in Jamaica, among them Luis Posada Cariles, an ex-secret police official under Cuban dictator Batista, currently a full-fledged agent of the CIA. The "duppies" (ghosts) policed dissent by incarnating the chemical warfare tactics of the1960s. In a year¹s time, Marley saw the Rastafarian resistance disintegrate with the rise of a ruthless, highly-organized narcotics syndicate, apparently from the Jamaican sand. The sudden abundance of hard narcotics in Jamaica wounded the Rastafarian movement with the burning spear of addiction.

Marley and former Wailer Peter Tosh promoted ganja as an alternative to cocaine and heroin, a statement of independence and cohesion against the brutal strategems of colonial rule. For the first time in Jamaican politics, public figures roundly criticized the governing elite. Peter Tosh, in particular, split from his peers in the local music scene by serving up impassioned political "livalogues" at his public performances. While a dying Bob Marley saw the wisdom in softening his political statements ("The War is Over"), and Bunny Wailer slipped into a snug harbor of reclusiveness, Tosh pushed on alone, the cursing, joint-smoking, speechifying black militant until his death six years after the passing of Marley.

The suppression of Rastafarian protest escalated in the late 1970s and grotesque human rights abuses were commonplace. And the political climate in the Caribbean sweltered with the escalation of American covert operations well into the next decade.

The Nazi Doctor
In September 1980, Bob Marley suffered a stroke while jogging in Central Park. He was released by a physician the following day and recuperated in his room at New York¹s Essex Hotel. Rita Marley flew in from Pittsburgh and choked when she saw him. Her fears rose into uncontrollable sobs, "Wha¹ has happened to you?" "Doctor say brain tumor black me out," Marley told her. Isaac Fergusson caught the dying rebel¹s performance at Madison Square Garden a few days before, and realized then that something was terribly wrong, even as Marley gripped his guitar "like a machine gun" and "threw his ropelike hair about," a "whirlwind around his small black face. The crack of a drum exploded into bass, into organ." Midway into the set, the Wailers stood back and Marley did a solo: "These songs of freedom is all I ever had..." Why, Fergusson wondered, was he singing this alone? Why the past tense?

"Emancipate yourself from mental slavery..."
Fergusson noticed that Marley "was always rubbing his forehead and grimacing while performing." The following weekend, Fergusson stopped to visit Rita Marley and Judy Mowatt. He asked about Bob¹s condition. "We don¹t know for sure," Rita told him, "the doctors say he has a tumor in his brain." In a silent moment, Fergusson realized that Marley was dying. He was convinced at last to seek medical treatment. Marley was admitted to the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan.

Tests revealed that the cancer had spread to his brain, lungs and liver. The patient received a few radiation treatments but checked out when the New York papers let on that the reggae legend was seriously ill. Marley consulted physicians in Miami, briefly returned to Sloan-Kettering, then Jamaica where he met with Dr. Carl "Pee Wee" Fraser, recommended to him by fellow Rastafarians. Dr, Fraser advised that Marley talk to Dr. Josef Issels, a "holistic comprehensive immunotherapist" then practicing at the Ringberg Clinic in Rottach-Egern, a small Bavarian village located at the southern end of Tegernsee Lake.

Marley traveled to Bavaria and checked into the clinic. Dr. Issels met him, looked him over and allowed, without naming sources: "I hear that you¹re one of the most dangerous black men in the world." The portrait offered by publicity releases from the Issels Foundation is imposing enough: Dr. Issels, born in 1907, founded the first hospital (financed by the estate of Karl Gischler, a Dutch shipping magnate) in Europe for comprehensive immunotherapy of cancer in 1951. He was the Medical Director and Director of Research.

All well and good ... until it is considered that by this time, Dr. Issels was 44 years old. Certainly, his medical career did not begin in 1951. Why the unexplained gap in his bona-fidés? During WW II, it seems, Dr. Issels could be found plying his "research" skills for Hitler¹s SS. Lew-Lee claims that Dr. Issels was assigned to the Auschwitz concentration camp, working aside Dr. Joseph Mengele.

But author Gordon Thomas, in a long out of print biography of Issels, contends that the doctor served in the SS only briefly. At any rate, he was indeed a member of the Nazi Party and served under Himmler. Bob Marley, the "dangerous" black upstart, had placed his life in the hands of a Nazi doctor. Lew-Lee recalls that Marley rejected conventional cancer treatments, "wanted to do anything but turn to Western medicine. This may have been a mistake." Evidently so. "Dr. Issels said that he could cure Bob. And they cut Bob¹s dreadlocks off. And he was getting all of this crazy, crazy medical treatment in Bavaria.

I know this because Devon Evans told me that Bob was receiving these medical treatments." Evans came by "every two or three months‹1979-80‹and told me: ŒYeah, mon,they¹re killing Bob. They are KILLING Bob.¹ I said, ŒWhat do you mean Œthey are killing Bob?¹ ŒNo, no, mon,¹ he said. ŒDis Dr. Issels, he¹s a Nazi!¹"

Dr. Issels was one of scores of Nazi practitioners to escape the attention of the Nuremberg Tribunal. Michael Kater, a professor of history at York University in Canada, informs us that physicians of the Hitler period were steeped in Nazi racial doctrines at medical school, that many of them continued to practice undisturbed by war crime tribunals: "it was in a conventional medical culture infiltrated from one side by a science alienated from humanity and from another by charlantry that young physicians in the Third Reich were raised to learn and prepare for practice, with many predestined to practice after 1945."

Dr. Joseph Issels first offered his alternative cancer therapies in a nazified atmosphere of ruthlessness and quackery. In the 1930s, chronic cancer patients consulted Dr. Issels and received his experimental "combination therapy," a regimen of diet, homeopathic remedies, vitamins, exercise and detoxification, among other holistic approaches. Today his clinic offers training in cancer immunization vaccines, UV blood irradiation, oxygen and ozone therapy, "biological dentistry" [tooth extraction], immunity elicitation by mixed bacterial vaccine, blood heating, and so on.)

The medical establishment, particularly in the UK, has long rallied against some of Issel¹s therapies. Thomas, a former BBC producer, reported in an televised documentary that Dr. Issels was arrested in September, 1960. The police warrant alleged, "the accused claims to treat ... cancer.... In fact [he] has neither reliable diagnostic methods nor a method to treat cancer successfully. It is contended [that] he is aware of the complete ineffectiveness of the so-called ... tumor treatment." The warrant noted that Issels was a flight risk, that "he had prepared for all contingencies by depositing huge amounts in foreign banks." Marley, unaware of his physician¹s past, was placed on a regimen of exercise, vaccines (some illegal), ozone injections, vitamin and trace minerals.

In time, Dr. Issels also introduced torture. Long needles were plunged through Marley¹s stomach through to the spine. The patient-victim was told that this was part of his "treatment." The torture continued until Marley foundered on the threshold of death.

Cedella Booker-Marley, his mother, visited him three times in the course of the "treatments." She found Dr. Issels to be an "arrogant wretch" with the "gruff manners of a bully" who subjected her dying son to a bloodless brand of "hocus-pocus" medicine. Booker-Marley: "I myself witnessed Issels¹ rough treatment of Nesta [Marley]. One time I went with Nesta to the clinic, and we settled down in a treatment room. Issels came in and announced to Nesta, ŒI¹m going to give you a needle.¹" Dr. Issels "plunged the needle straight into Nesta¹s navel right down to the syringe. [Marley] grunted and winced. He could only lie there helplessly, writhing on the table, trying his best to hide his pain.

ŒJesus Christ,¹ I heard myself mumbling." Issels yanked out the needle and strolled casually out of the room. Marley was left groaning with pain. "I went and stood at his side and held his hand."

"With every visit," she recalls, "I found him smaller, frailer, thinner. As the months of dying dragged past, the suffering was etched all over his face. He would fall into fits of shaking, when he would lose all control and shiver from head to toe like a coconut leaf in a breeze. His eyes would turn in his head, rolling in their sockets until even the white jelly was quivering."

Marley¹s torment was aggravated by starvation. "For a whole week sometimes," Booker laments, her son "would be allowed no nourishment other than what he got intravenously. Constantly hungry, even starving, he wasted away to a skeleton"‹starved to death like an Auschwitz inmate. "To watch my first-born shrivel up to skin and bone ripped at my mother¹s heart." Marley weighed 82 pounds on the day of his death.

The starvation diet must have devastated his immune system and rushed his demise, not prolonged his life as Dr. Issels and some biographers have contended. It also caused him intense pain. "It would drag on so, for one long painful month after the other, and every day would be a knife that death stabbed and twisted anew in an already open, bleeding wound." The agony "wrapped him up like a crushing snake."

Death finally claimed Marley on May 11, 1980. In Jamaica, the 20th was declared a national day of mourning. Marley¹s wake at the National Arena was attended by some 30,000 mourners.

He was survived by his old partner Peter Tosh, who was shot to death in 1987. Marley and Tosh were not the only musicians murdered for political reasons in Jamaca. By the end of the decade, all Jamaican musicians were censored and subject to shell-casing politics.

The island¹s Daily Gleamer reported in 1987 that Winston "Yellowman" Foster, stopped at a police roadblock and frisked for drugs, resisted detainment. One of the officers hissed, "You want to go like Tosh?" When Tosh went there was nothing random about it. Witnesses and friends insist that he was a political hit. Two of the gunmen fled New York and remain at large. The third was Leppo Leppon, an ex-con sentenced for the murder after an 11-minute trial.

Like Marley, Peter Tosh found the bloodshed and hypocrisy of death squad justice and CIA covert ops in the Third World unbearable. He was so obsessed with hidden evil and the upswell of violence in Jamaica that they visited him in his sleep. He had "visions" of "destruction [and] millions of people inside of pit going down. And I ... say, Œblood bath, where so much people come from?¹ And looking in the pit, mon, it the biggest pit...but the way the people was crying, it was awful."

[UniverseSeven]

Chapter seven from the book The Covert War Against Rock by Alex Constantine


Published by Feral House, 2000


I Don't Live Today:

The Jimi Hendrix Political Harassment, Kidnap and Murder Experience


"I don't believe for one minute that he killed himself. That was out of the question."


- Chas Chandler, Hendrix Producer


"I believe the circumstances surrounding his death are suspicious and I think he was murdered."


- Ed Chalpin, Proprietor of Studio 76


"I feel he was murdered, frankly. Somebody gave him something. Somebody gave him something they shouldn't
have."


- John McLaughlin, Guitarist, Mahavishnu Orchestra


He didn't die from a drug overdose. He was not an out-of-control dope fiend. Jimi Hendrix was not a junkie. And anyone who would use his death as a warning to stay away from drugs should warn people against the other things that killed Jimi-the stresses of dealing with the music industry, the craziness of being on the road, and especially, the dangers of involving oneself in a radical, or even unpopular, political movements.

COINTELPRO was out to do more than prevent a Communist menace from overtaking the United States, or keep the Black Power movement from burning down cities. COINTELPRO was out to obliterate its opposition and ruin the reputations of the people involved in the antiwar movement, the civil rights movement, and the rock revolution. Whenever Jimi Hendrix's death is blamed on drugs, it accomplishes the goals of the FBI's program. It not only slanders Jimi's personal and professional reputation, but the entire rock revolution in the 60's.


-John Holmstrom. "Who Killed Jimi?"(1)



As the music of youth and resistance fell under the cross-hairs of the CIA's CHAOS war, it was probable that Jimi Hendrix-the tripping, peacenik "Black Elvis" of the '60s-should find himself a target.

Agents of the pathologically nationalistic FBI opened a file on Hendrix in 1969 after his appearance at several benefits for "subversive" causes. His most cutting insult to the state was participation in a concert for Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, Bobby Seale and the other defendants of the Chicago Seven conspiracy trial,(2) "Get [the] Black Panthers," he told a reporter for a teen magazine, "not to kill anybody, but to scare [federal officials]....I know it sounds like war, but that's what's gonna have to happen. It has to be a war....You come back to reality and there are some evil folks around and they want you to be passive and weak and peaceful so that they can just overtake you like jelly on bread....You have to fight fire with fire."(3)
On tour in Liesburg, Sweden, Hendrix was interviewed by Tommy Rander, a reporter for the Gotesborgs-Tidningen. " In the USA, you have to decide which side you're on," Hendrix explained. "You are either a rebel or like Frank Sinatra."(4)

In 1979, college students at the campus newspaper of Santa Barbara University (USB) filed for release of FBI files on Hendrix. Six heavily inked-out pages were released to the student reporters. (The deletions nixed information "currently and properly classified pursuant to Executive Order 11652, in the interest of national defense of foreign policy.") On appeal, seven more pages were reluctantly turned over to the UCSB students. The file revealed that Hendrix had been placed on the federal "Security Index," a list of "subversives" to be rounded up and placed in detainment camps in the event of a national emergency.

If the intelligence agencies had their reasons to keep tabs on Hendrix, they couldn't have picked a better man for the job than Hendrix's manager, Mike Jeffrey. Jeffrey, by his own admission an intelligence agent,(5) was born in South London in 1933, the sole child of postal workers. He completed his education in 1949, took a job as a clerk for Mobil Oil, was drafted to the National Service two years later. Jeffrey's scores in science took him to the Educational Corps. He signed on as a professional soldier, joined the Intelligence Corps and at this point his career enters an obscure phase.

Hendix biographers Shapiro & Glebeek report that Jeffrey often boasted of "undercover work against the Russians, of murder, mayhem and torture in foreign cities....His father says Mike rarely spoke about what he did-itself perhaps indicative of the sensitive nature of his work-but confirms that much of Mike's military career was spent in 'civvies,' that he was stationed in Egypt and that he could speak Russian."(6)

There was, however, another, equally intriguing side of Mike Jeffrey: He frequently hinted that he had powerful underworld connections. It was common knowledge that he had had an abiding professional relationship with Steve Weiss, the attorney for both the Hendrix Experience and the Mafia-managed Vanilla Fudge, hailing from the law firm of Seingarten, Wedeen & Weiss. On one occasion, when drummer Mitch Mitchell found himself in a fix with police over a boat he'd rented and wrecked, mobsters from the Fudge management office intervened and pried him loose.(7)

Organized crime has had fingers in the recording industry since the jukebox wars. Mafioso Michael Franzene testified in open court in the late 1980s that "Sonny" Franzene, his stepfather, was a silent investor in Buddah Records. At this industry oddity, the inane, nasal, apolitical '60s "Bubblegum" song was blown from the goo of adolescent mating fantasies. The most popular of Buddah's acts were the 1910 Fruitgum Company and Ohio Express. These bands shared a lead singer, Joey Levine. Some cultural contributions from the Buddha label: "Yummy, Yummy, Yummy," "Simon Says," and "1-2-3 Red Light."

In 1971, Buddha Records' Bobby Bloom was killed in a shooting sometimes described as "accidental," sometimes "suicide," at the age of 28. Bloom made a number of solo records, including "Love Don't Let Me Down," and "Count On Me." He formed a partnership with composer Jeff Barry and they wrote songs for the Monkees in their late period. Bloom made the Top 10 with the effervescent "Montego Bay" in 1970. Other Mafia-managed acts of the late 1960s were equally apolitical: Vanilla Fudge ("You Keep Me Hangin' On," "Bang, Bang"),(9) Motown's Gladys Knight and the Pips, and Curtis Mayfield.(10) In the '60s and beyond, organized crime wrenched unto itself control of industry workers via the Teamsters Union. Trucking was Mob controlled. So were stadium concessions. No rock bands toured unless money exchanged hands to see that a band's instruments weren't delivered to the wrong airport.(11)

Intelligence agent or representative of the mob? Whether Jeffrey was either or both-and the evidence is clear that a CIA/Mafia combination has exercised considerable influence in the music industry for decades-at a certain point, Hendrix must have seen something that made him desperately want out of his management contract with Jeffrey.

Monika Dannemann, Hendrix's fiancé at the time of his death, describes Mike Jeffrey's control tactics, his attempts to isolate and manipulate Hendrix, with observations of his evolving awareness that Jeffrey was a covert operator bent on dominating his life and mind:

Jimi felt more and more unsafe in New York, the city where he used to feel so much at home. It had begun to serve as a prison to him, and a place where he had to watch his back all the time.

In May 1969 Jimi was arrested at Toronto for possession of drugs. He later told me he believed Jeffrey had used a third person to plant the drugs on him-as a warning, to teach him a lesson.

Jeffrey had realized not only that Jimi was looking for ways of breaking out of their contract, but also that Jimi might have calculated that the Toronto arrest would be an easy way to silence Jimi.... Jeffrey did not like Jimi to have friends who would put ideas in his dead and give him strength. He preferred Jimi to be more isolated, or to mix with certain people whom Jeffrey could use to influence and try to manipulate him.

So in New York, Jimi felt at times that he was under surveillance, and others around him noticed the same. He tried desperately to get out of his management contract, and asked several people for advice on the best way to do it. Jimi started to understand the people around him could not be trusted, as things he had told them in confidence now filtered through to Jeffrey. Obviously some people informed his manager of Jimi's plans, possibly having been bought or promised advantages by Jeffrey. Jimi had always been a trusting and open person, but now he had reason to become suspicious of people he didn't know well, becoming quite secretive and keeping very much to himself.(12)

Five years after the death of the virtuoso, Crawdaddy reported that friends of Hendrix felt "he was very unhappy and confused before his death. Buddy Miles recalled 'numerous times he complained about his managers." His chief roadie, Gerry Stickells, told Welch, "he became frustrated...by a lot of people around him."(13)

Hendrix was obsessed with the troubles that Jeffrey and company brought to his life and career. The band's finances were entirely controlled by management and were depleted by a tax haven in the Bahamas founded in 1965 by Michael Jeffrey called Yameta Co., a subsidiary of the Bank of New Providence, with accounts at the Naussau branch of the Bank of Nova Scotia and the Chemical Bank in New York.(14)

A substantial share of the band's earnings had been quietly drained by Yameta. The banks where Jeffrey opened accounts have been officially charged with the laundering of drug proceeds, a universal theme of CIA/Mafia activity. (The Chemical Bank was forced to plead guilty to 445 misdemeanors in 1980 when a federal investigation found that bank officials had failed to report transactions they knew to derive from drug trafficking.(15) The Bank of Nova Scotia was a key investor in the Bank of Commerce and Credit International, BCCI, once described by Time magazine as "the most pervasive money-laundering operation and financial supermarket ever create," with ties to the upper echelons of several governments, the CIA, the Pentagon and the Vatican.(16) BCCI maintained warm relationships with international terrorists, and investigators turned up accounts for Libya, Syria and the PLO at BCCI's London branch, recalling Mike Jeffrey's military intelligence interest in the Middle East. And then there were bank records from Panama City relating to General Noriega. These "disappeared'' en route to the District of Columbia under heavy DEA guard. An internal investigation later, DEA officials admitted they were at a loss to explain the theft.(17)

Friends of Hendrix, according to Electric Gypsy, confiscated financial documents from his New York office and turned them over to Jimi: "One showed that what was supposed to be a $10,000 gig was in fact grossing $50,000."

"Jimi Hendrix was upset that large amounts of his money were missing," reports rock historian R. Gary Patterson. Hendrix had discovered the financial diversions and took legal action to recover them.(18)
But there was another factor also involving funds.

Some of Hendrix's friends have concluded that "Jeffrey stood to make a greater sum of money from a dead Jimi Hendrix than a living one. There was also mention of a one million dollar insurance policy covering Hendrix's life made out with Jeffrey as the beneficiary." The manager of the Experience constructed "a financial empire based on the posthumous releases of Hendrix's previously unreleased recordings."(19) Crushing musical voices of dissent was proving to be an immensely profitable enterprise because a dead rocker leaves behind a fortune in publishing rights and royalties.

Roadies couldn't help but notice that Mike Jeffrey, a seasoned military intelligence officer, was capable of "subtle acts of sabotage against them," reports Shapiro. Jeffrey booked the Experience for a concert tour with the Monkees and Hendrix was forced to cancel when the agony of playing to hordes of 12-year-old children, and fear of a parental backlash, convinced him to bail out.

As for the arrest in Toronto, Hendrix confidantes blame Jeffrey for the planted heroin. The charges were dropped after Hendrix argued that the unopened container of dope had been dropped into his travel bag upon departure by a girl who claimed that it was cold medicine.(20)

In July, 1970, one month before his death, at precisely the time Hendrix stopped all communications with Jeffrey, he told Chuck Wein, a film director at Andy Warhol's Factory: "The next time I go to Seattle will be in a pine box."(21)

And he knew who would drop him in it. Producer Alan Douglas recalls that Hendrix "had a hang-up about the word 'manager.'" The guitarist had pled with Douglas, the proprietor of his own jazz label, to handle the band's business affairs. One of the most popular musicians in the world was desperate. He appealed to a dozen business contacts to handle his bookings and finances, to no avail.(22)

Meanwhile, the sabotage continued in every possible form. Douglas: "Regardless of whatever else Jimi wanted to do, Mike would keep pulling him back or pushing him back....And the way the gigs were routed! I mean, one nighters-he would do Ontario one night, Miami the next night, California the next night. He used to waste [Hendrix] on a tour-and never make too much money because the expenses were ridiculous."(23)

The obits were a jumbled lot of skewed, contradictory eulogies: "DRUGS KILL JIMI HENDRIX AT 24," "ROCK STAR IS DEAD IN LONDON AT 27," "OVERDOSE." Many of the obituaries dwelt on the "wild man of rock" image, but there were also many personal commentaries from reporters who followed his career closely, and they dismissed as hype reports of chronic drug abuse. Mike Ledgerwood, a writer for Disc and Music Echo, offered a portrait that the closest friends of Jimi Hendrix confirm: "Despite his fame and fortune-plus the inevitable hang-ups and hustles which beset his incredible career-he remained a quiet and almost timid individual. He was naturally helpful and honest." Sounds magazine "found a man of quite remarkable charm, an almost old-world courtesy."

Hendrix biographer Tony Brown has, since the mid-'70s, collected all the testimony he could find relating to Hendrix's death, and finds it "tragic" but "predictable":

"The official cause of death was asphyxiation caused by inhaling his own vomit, but in the days and weeks leading up to the tragedy anyone with an ounce of common sense could see that Hendrix was heading for a terrible fall. Unfortunately, no one close to him managed to steer him clear of the maelstrom that was closing in. Brown sent a report based on his own investigation to the Attorney General's office in February, 1992, "in the hope that they would reopen the inquest into Jimi's death. The evidence was so strong that they ordered Scotland Yard detectives to conduct their own investigation." Months later, detectives at the Yard responded to Sir Nicholas Lyle at the Attorney General's office, rejecting the proposal to revive the inquest.(24)

The pathologist's report left the cause of death "open." Monika Dannemann had long insisted that Hendrix was murdered. At the time of her death, she had brought media attention to the case in a bitter and highly-publicized court battle with former Hendrix girlfriend Kathy Etchningham. On April 5, 1996, her body was discovered in a fume-filled car near her home in Seaford, Sussex, south England. Police dismissed the death as a "suicide" and the corporate press took dictation. But the Eastern Daily Press, a newspaper that circulates in the East Anglian region of the UK, raised another possibility: "Musician Uli Jon Roth, speaking at the thatched cottage where Miss Dannemann lived, said last night: 'The thing looks suspicious. She had a lot of death threats against her over the years....I always felt that she was really being crucified in front of everybody, and there was nothing anyone could do about it.' Mr Roth, formerly with the group The Scorpions, said Miss Danneman 'is not a person to do something to herself.'" Roth threw one more inconsistency on the lot: "She didn't believe in the concept of suicide."

Devon Wilson, another Hendrix paramour, in Experience drummer Mitch Mitchell's view, "died under mysterious circumstances herself a few years later."

Red, Red Wine

Was Hendrix murdered while under the influence? Stanton Steele, an authority on addiction, offers a seemingly plausible explanation: "Extremely intoxicated people while asleep often lose the reflexive tendency to clear one's throat of mucus, or they may strangle in their vomit. This appeared to have happened to Jimi Hendrix, who had taken both alcohol and prescription barbiturates the night of his death."(26)

Evidence has recently come to light clarifying the cause of death-extreme alcohol consumption aggravated by the barbiturates in Hendrix's bloodstream-drowning. Hendrix is said to have choked to death after swallowing nine Vesperax sleeping tablets. This is not the lethal dose he'd have taken if suicide was the intent-he surely would have swallowed the remaining 40 or so pills in the packets Dannemann gave him if this was the idea-as Eric Burdon, the Animals' vocalist and a friend of Hendrix, has suggested over the years.

Hendrix was not felled by a drug overdose, as many news reports claimed. The pills were a sleeping aid, and not a very effective one at that. The two Vesperax that Dannemann saw him take before she fell asleep at 3 am failed to put him under. He had taken a Durophet 20 amphetamine capsule at a dinner party the evening before. And then Hendrix, a chronic insomniac with an escalated tolerance level for barbiturates, had tried the Vesperax before and they proved ineffective. He apparently believed nine tablets would do him no harm.

At 10 am, Dannemann awoke and went out for a pack of cigarettes, according to her inquest testimony. When she returned, he was sick. She phoned Eric Bridges, a friend, and informed him that Hendrix wasn't well. "Half asleep," Bridges reported in his autobiography, "I suggested she give him hot coffee and slap his face. If she needed any more help to call me back." Dannemann called the ambulance at 18 minutes past eleven. The ambulance arrived nine minutes later. Hendrix was not, she claimed, in critical condition. She said the paramedics checked his pulse and breathing, and stated there was "nothing to worry about."

But a direct contradiction came in an interview with Reg Jones, one of the attendants, who insisted that Dannemann wasn't at the flat when they arrived, and that Hendrix was already dead. "It was horrific," Jones said. "We arrived at the flat and the door was flung wide open...."I knew he was dead as soon as I walked into the room." Ambulance attendant John Suau confirmed, "we knew it was hopeless. There was no pulse, no respiration."(27)

The testimonies of Dannemann and medical personnel at the 1970 inquest are disturbingly contradictory. Hendrix, the medical personnel stated, had been dead for at least seven hours by the time the ambulance arrived. Dr. Rufus Compson at the Department of Forensic Medicine at St. George's Medical School undertook his own investigation. He referred to the original medical examiner's report and discovered that there were rice remains in Hendrix's stomach. It takes three-four hours for the stomach to empty, he reasoned, and the deceased ate Chinese food at a dinner party hosted by Pete Cameron between the hours of 11 pm and midnight, placing the time of death no later than 4 am.(28) This is consistent with the report of Dr. Bannister, the surgical registrar, that "the inside of his mouth and mucous membranes were black because he had been dead for some time." Dr. Bannister told the London Times, "Hendrix had been dead for hours rather than minutes when he was admitted to the hospital."(29)

[UniverseSeven]

The inquest itself was "unusual," Tony Brown notes, because "none of the other witnesses involved were called to give their evidence, nor was any attempt made to ascertain the exact time of death," as if the subject was to be avoided. The result was that the public record on this basic fact in the case may have been incorrectly cited by scores of reporters and biographers. Tony Brown: "Even [medical examiner] Professor Teare made no attempt to ascertain the exact time of death. The inquest appeared to be conducted merely as a formality and had not been treated by the coroner as a serious investigation."(30)

In 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky (1996), Bill Henderson describes the inquest and its aftermath: "Those who followed his death....noticed many inconsistencies in the official inquest. It has been an open and shut affair that managed to hide its racist intent behind the public perceptual hoax of Hendrix as a substance abuser....As a result, millions of people all over the world thought that Hendrix had died that typical rock star's death: drug OD amid fame, opulence, decadence. But it seems that Hendrix could very well have been the victim not of decadence, but of foul play."(31)

Forensic tests submitted at the inquest have been supplemented over the years by new evidence that makes a reconstruction of the murder possible. In October, 1991, Steve Roby, publisher of Straight Ahead, a Hendrix fanzine, asked, "What Really Happened?": "Kathy Etchingham, a close friend/lover of Jimi's, and Dee Mitchell, Mitch Mitchell's wife, spent many months tracking down former friends and associates of Hendrix, and are convinced they have solved the mystery of the final hours." Central to reconstructing Hendrix's death is red wine. Dr. Bannister reports that after the esophagus had been cleared, "masses" of red wine were "coming out of his nose and out of his mouth." The wine gushing up in great volume from Hendrix's lungs "is very vivid because you don't often see people who have drowned in their own red wine. He had something around him-whether it was a towel or a jumper-around his neck and that was saturated with red wine. His hair was matted. He was completely cold. I personally think he probably died a long time before....He was cold and he was blue."(32) Henderson writes:

The abstract morbidity of Hendrix's body upon discovery may indicate a more complex scenario than has been commonly held. Hendrix was not a red wine guzzler, especially in the amounts found in and around his body. He was known to be moderate in his consumption. If he was 'sleeping normally,' then why was he fully clothed? And how could the ambulance attendants have missed seeing someone who was supposed to be there? The garment, or towel, around his neck is totally mysterious given the scenario so widely distributed. But it is consistent with the doctor's statement that he drowned. Was he drowned by force? In a radio interview broadcast out of Holland in the early '70s, an unnamed girlfriend answered 'yes' to the question, 'Was Hendrix killed by the Mafia?'"(33)

Tony Brown, in Hendrix: The Final Days (1997), correlates the consumption of the wine to the approximate time of death: "It's unlikely that he drank the quantity of red wine found by Dr. Bannister.... Therefore, Jimi must have drunk a large quantity of red wine just prior to his death," suggesting that the quantity of alcohol in his lungs was the direct cause.(34)

The revised time of death, 3-4 am, contradicts the gap in the official record, and so does the revelation that Jimi Hendrix drowned in red wine. While it is common knowledge that Hendrix choked to death, it has only recently come to light that the wine-not the Verparex-was the primary catalyst of death. Hendrix was, the evidence suggests, forced to drink a quantity of wine. The barbiturates, as Brown notes, "seriously inhibited Jimi's normal cough reflex." Unable to cough the wine back up, "it went straight down into his lungs....It is quite possible that he thrashed about for some time, fighting unsuccessfully to gain his breath."(35) It is doubtful that Hendrix would have continued to swallow the wine in "massive" volumes had it begun to fill his lungs. One explanation that explains the forensic evidence is that Jimi Hendrix was restrained, wine forced down his throat until his thrashings ceased. All of this must have taken place quickly, before the alcohol had time to enter his bloodstream. The post mortem report states that the blood alcohol level was not excessive, about 20mg over the legal drinking limit. He died before his stomach absorbed much of the wine. Jimi Hendrix choked to death. That much of the general understanding of his demise is correct, and little else.

The kidnapping, embezzling and numerous shady deceptions would make Jeffrey the leading suspect in any proper police investigation. And his reaction at the news of Hendrix's death did little to dispel any suspicions that associates may have harbored. Jim Marron, a nightclub owner from Manhattan, was vacationing with Jeffrey in Spain when word of the musician's death reached him. "We were supposed to have dinner that night in Majorca," Marron recalls. Jeffrey "called me from his club in Palma saying that we would have to cancel....I've just got word from London. Jimi's dead." The manager of the Hendrix Experience took the news completely in stride. "I always knew that son of a bitch would pull a quickie," Jeffrey told Marron. "Basically, he had lost a major property. You had the feeling that he had just lost a couple of million dollars-and was the first to realize it. My first reaction was, Oh my God, my friend is dead."(36) But Jeffrey reacted coldly, comparing the fatality to a fleeting sexual romp in the afternoon.

His odd behavior continued in the days following the death of Hendrix. He appeared to be consumed by guilt, and on one occasion "confessed." On September 20, recording engineer Alan Douglas received a call from Jeffrey, who wanted to see him. Douglas drove to the hotel where Jeffrey was staying. "He was bent over, in misery from a recent back injury. We started talking and he let it all out. It was like a confession."
"In my opinion," Douglas observed, "Jeffrey hated Hendrix."

Bob Levine, the band's merchandising manager, was perplexed by Jeffrey's response to the tragedy. First, Hendrix's manager dropped completely out of sight. "We tried calling all of Jeffrey's contacts....trying to reach him. We were getting frustrated because Hendrix's body was going to be held up in London for two weeks and we wanted Jeffrey's input on the funeral service. A full week after Hendrix's death, he finally called. Hearing his voice, I immediately asked what his plans were and would he be going to Seattle. 'What plans?' he asked. I said, 'the funeral.' 'What funeral?' he replied. I was exasperated: 'Jimi's!' The phone went quiet for a while and then he hung up. The whole office was staring at me, unable to believe that with all the coverage on radio, print and television, Jeffrey didn't know that Jimi had died." As noted, Jeffrey had been notified and almost grieved, in his fashion. "He called back in five minutes and we talked quietly. He said, 'Bob, I didn't know,' and was asking about what had happened. While I didn't confront him, I knew he was lying."(37)
It was reported that Michael Jeffrey "paid his respects" sitting in a limousine parked outside Dunlap Baptist Church in Seattle. He refused to go inside for the eulogy.(38) Hendrix was buried at the family plot at Greenwood Cemetary in Renton.

Screenwriter Alan Greenberg was hired to write a screenplay for a film on the life of Jimi Hendrix. He traveled to England and taped an interview with Dannemann shortly before her death in April, 1996. In that interview, Dannemann sketched in more details of Jeffrey's skullduggery, which continued after Hendrix's death and has long been concealed behind a wall of misconceptions. On the Greenberg tapes, Dannemann denied allegations of heroin use, as do others close to Hendrix: "You should put that into the right perspective since all of the youngsters still think he was a drug addict. The problem was, when he died, I was told by the coroner not to talk until after the inquest, so that's why all these wild stories came out that he overdosed from heroin." The coroner found no injection tracks on Hendrix's body. That he snorted the opiate, a charge advanced by biographer Chris Welch in Hendrix, is disputed by Jimi's closest friends. He indulged primarily in marijuana and LSD. The popular misconception that Hendrix was a heroin addict lingers on but should have been buried with him. One of rock's greatest talents was maliciously smeared by the press on this count.

At times, he public has been deliberately misled about Hendrix's drug habits. Kathy Etchingham, a former girlfriend, was deceived into giving an article about Jimi to a friend in the corporate media, and it was snatched up by a newspaper, rewritten, and the story that emerged depicted the guitarist as a violent and drug-infested lunatic. The editor later apologized in writing to Kathy for falsifying the record, but failed to retract in print.(39) Media swipes at Hendrix to this day are often unreasonably vicious, as in this transparent attempt to shape public opinion from London's Times on December 14, 1993:

Not only did [Hendrix] leave several memorable compositions behind him; he left a good-looking corpse. Kathy Etchnigham, a middle-class mother of two, who used to be one of Hendrix's lovers, still mourns his passing and is seeking to persuade the police that there is something suspicious about the circumstances in which he died. Quite why she should bother is hard to say. Perhaps she is bored.

Hendrix, we are advised, "lived an absurdly self-indulgent life and died, in essence, of stupidity."

Close friends of Jimi Hendrix suggest that Jeffrey was the front man for a surreptitious sponsor, the FBI, CIA or Mafia. In 1975, Crawdaddy magazine launched its own investigation and concluded that a death squad of some kind had targeted him: "Hendrix is not the only artist to have had his career sabotaged by unscrupulous sharks and leeches." The recent memory of the death of Average White Band drummer Robby McIntosh from strychnine-laced heroin circulating at a party in L.A. "only serves to update this fact of rock-and-roll life. But an industry that accepts these tragedies in cold blood demonstrates its true nature-and the Jimi Hendrix music machine cranks out, unencumbered by the absence of Hendrix himself. One wonders who'll be the next in line?"(40)

On March 5, as if in reply, Michael Jeffrey, every musician's nightmare, was blown out of the sky in an airplane collision over France, enroute to a court appearance in London related to Hendrix. Jeffrey was returning from Palma aboard an Iberia DC-9 in the midst of a French civil air traffic control strike. Military controllers were called in as a contingency replacements for the controllers. Hendrix biographer Bill Henderson considers the midair collision fuel for "paranoia." The nature of military airline control "necessitated rigorous planning, limited traffic on each sector and strict compliance with regulations. The DC-9 however was assigned to the same flight over Nantes as a Spantax Coronado, which 'created a source of conflict.' And because of imprecise navigation, lack of complete radar coverage and imperfect radio communications, the two planes collided. The Coronado was damaged but remained airworthy; no one was injured. The DC-9 crashed, killing all 61 passengers and seven crew . . . ." There are [theories] that Jeffrey was merely a tool, a mouthpiece for the real villains lurking in the wings, that he was "the target of assassination."(41)

A quarter-century after Hendrix died, his father finally won control of the musical legacy. Under a settlement signed in 1995, the rights to his son's music were granted to 76-year-old Al Hendrix, the sole heir to the estate. The agreement, settled in court, forced Hendrix to drop a fraud suit filed two years earlier against Leo Branton Jr., the L.A. civil rights attorney who represented Angela Davis and Nat King Cole. Hendrix accused his lawyer of selling the rights to the late rock star's publishing catalogue without consent.

Hendrix, Sr. filed the suit on April 19, 1993, after learning that MCA Music Entertainment-a company rife with Mafia connections-was readying to snatch up his son's recording and publishing rights from two international companies that claimed to own them. The MCA deal, estimated to be worth $40 million, was put on hold after objections were raised in a letter to the Hollywood firm from Hendrix. By this time, Experience albums generated more than $3-million per a Ênnum in royalties, and $1-million worth of garments, posters and paraphernalia bearing his name and likeness are sold each year. All told, Al Hendrix received $2-million over the next 20 years.(42)



NOTES


1. John Holstrom, "Who Killed Jimi?" Lions Gate Media Works, lionsgate.com/Music/hendrix/I_ Dont_Live_Today.html.


2. John Raymond and Marv Glass, "The FBI Investigated Jimi Hendrix," Common Ground, University of Santa Barbara, CA student newspaper, vol. iv, no. 9, June 7, 1979, P. 1.


3. "Jimi Hendrix, Black Power and Money," Teenset, January, 1969.


4. Tony Brown, Hendrix: The Final Days, London: Rogan House, 1997, p. 43.


5. On Mike Jeffrey's undefined politics, see: John McDermott with Eddie Kramer, Hendrix: Setting the Record Straight, New York: Warner, 1992, p. 180.


6. Harry Shapiro and Ceasar Glebbeek, Jimi Hendrix, Electric Gypsy, New York: St. Martin's, 1990, p. 120.


7. Bill Henderson, "IT'S LIKE TRYING TO GET OUT OF A ROOM FULL OF MIRRORS," Jimi Hendrix web page, www.rockmine. music.co.uk/jimih. html.


8. Fredric Dannen, Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Industry, New York: Times Books, 1990, p. 164-5.


9. Shapiro and Glebbeek, Jimi Hendrix, Electric Gypsy, New York: St. Martin's, 1990, p. 294. The Fudge once booked a tour with Jimi Hendrixs, per arrangement between the band's mobbed-up management and Michael Jeffrey, Hendrix's manager.


10. Dannen, p. 165.


11. Shapiro and Glebbeek, p. 295.


12. Monika Dannemann, The Inner World of Jimi Hendrix, New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995, pp. 76-8.


13, John Swenson, "The Last Days of Jimi Hendrix," Crawdaddy, January, 1975, p. 43.


14. Ibid., p. 488 ff.


15. "Banks and Narcotics Money Flow in Suth Florida," U.S. Senate Banking Committee report, 96th Congress, June 5-6, 1980, p. 201.


16. Jonathon Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA, New York: Touchstone, 1987, p. 153.


17. Josh Rodin, "BANK OF CROOKS AND CRIMINALS?" Topic 105, Christic News, Aug 6, 1991.


18. R. Gary Patterson, Hellhounds on Their Trail: Tales from the Rock-n'-Roll Graveyard, Nashville, Tennessee: Dowling Press, 1998, p. 208.


19. Ibid.


20. Shapiro and Glebbeek, p. 473.


21. Shapiro and Glebbeek, p. 477.


22. Swenson. In Crosstown Traffic (1989), Charles Murray reports that Hendrix "began consulting independent lawyers and accountants with a view of sorting out his tangled finances and freeing himself from Mike Jeffrey" (p. 55).


23. Henderson Web site.


24. Brown, p. 7.


25. Mitch Mitchell with John Platt, Jimi Hendrix-Inside the Experience, New York: St. Martin's, 1990, p. 160.


26. Stanton Steele, "The Human Side Of Addiction: What caused John Belushi's death?" U.S. Journal of Drug and Alcohol Dependence, April 1982, p. 7.


27. David Henderson, 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky, New York: Bantam, 1996, pp. 389-90.


28. Brown, p. 164.


29. Henderson, p. 392.


30. Brown, p. 163.


31. Henderson, p. 388.


32. Ibid., p. 392.


33. Henderson, 'Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky, p. 393. If the Mafia did indeed participate, Hendrix wasn't the first Afrifcan-American musician to have a contract on his head. In May 1955, jazz saxman Wardell Gray was murdered, probably by Mafia hitmen. Gray had toured with Benny Goodman and Count Basie in 1948. His remarkable recording sessions of the late 1940s, especially with Dexter Gordon, brought him fame. Bill Moody, a jazz drummer and disk jockey, published a novel in 1996, Death of a Tenor Man, based on the life and death of Grey. "It's strange," a publisher's press release comments, "that 1950s Las Vegas, a town in which the Mob and corrupt police worked hand in glove, became the home of the first integrated nightclub in the country. The Moulin Rouge was owned by blacks and had the honor of being the only casino hotel in Vegas that allowed African-Americans to mingle with white customers. On opening night, Nat 'King' Cole and Frank Sinatra sat in with Benny Carter's band. The second night, Wardell Gray, a black sax player in the Carter band with a growing reputation, was beaten to death. The police said he overdosed and 'fell out of bed,' dying later 'of complications.' Some suspected Gray's death was the Mob's way of telling the African-American businessmen who backed the Moulin Rouge that 'this town isn't big enough for the both of us.' Gray's murder has never been investigated. It "hung over the Moulin Rouge like a storm cloud" and remains unsolved. The casino went out of business a few months later.

And the 1961 attempt on the life of soul singer Jackie Wilson has never been rationally explained. Wilson was shot in the stomach by a fan supposedly trying to "prevent a fan from killing herself." He recovered from the assault and went on to release "No Pity (In the Naked City)," and "Higher and Higher."

The Halloween, 1975 murder of Al Jackson, percussionist for Booker T. and the MGs, at the age of 39, also appeared to be a premeditated hit. Barbara Jackson, his wife, was the sole eyewitness. She told police, according to Rolling Stone, that she "arrived home on the night of the shooting and was met by a gun-wielding burglar who tied her hands behind her back with an ironing cord." Al Jackson, who'd been taking in a closed circuit telecast of the Muhammad Ali-Joe Frazier fight, arrived an hour later. Any burglar would have collected valuables in the house and fled by this time, but he waited a full hour for Jackson to return home. Babara Jackson was freed from the ropes and the "burglar" ordered her at gunpoint to open the door for him. "After confronting Jackson and asking him for money, the intruder forced him to lie on the floor. He then shot Jackson five times in the back and left." (Rolling Stone, November 1975)


34. Brown, p. 165.


35. Brown, pp. 165-66.


36. McDermott and Kramer, pp. 286-87.


37. Ibid.


38. Ibid.


39. Shapiro and Glebeek, p. 474.


40. Swenson, p. 45.


41. Henderson Web site.


42. Chuck Philips, "Father to Get Hendrix Song, Image Rights," Los Angeles Times (home edition), July 26, 1995, p. 1. Also named as defendants were producer Alan Douglas and several firms that have profited from the Hendrix catalogue since 1974 under contracts negotiated by Branton: New York-based Bella Godiva Music Inc; Presentaciones Musicales SA (PMSA), a Panamanian corporation; Bureau Voor Muzeikrechten Elber B. V. in the Netherlands; and Interlit, based in the Virgin Islands.

Branton negotiated two contracts in early 1974-signed by Al Hendrix-that relinquished all rights to his son's "unmastered" tapes for $50,000 to PMSA and all his stock in Bella Godiva, his son's music publishing company, for $50,000."PMSA and the other overseas companies were later discovered to be part of a tax shelter system created by Harry Margolis," reported the L.A. Times, "a Saratoga attorney whom federal prosecutors charged but never convicted of tax fraud. The tax shelter plan collapsed after Margolis' death in 1987, and also [prompted] complaints from the estates of other entertainment clients, including singer Nat King Cole, screenwriter Larry Hauben as well as from followers of New Age philosopher Werner Erhard, who allegedly stashed revenues from his EST enterprise in the foreign account."