MARK SHAW BOOKS : READ MORE FROM THIS ACCOMPLISHED INVESTIGATIVE AUTHOR : TRUTH and JUSTICE FOR DOROTHY KILGALLEN

MARK SHAW BOOKS - OFFICIAL    https://markshawbooks.com/

Connect to Mark's books, speaking engagements, and so on. I hope I have given him - and the subject of Dorothy Kilgallen - my best in this month's posts.  On one of the broadcasts I listened to he said that because of his public speaking he gets new information often.

I listened to YouTube interviews and speeches by Mark in which he talks about this book and I do hope that an investigation of her death will be reopened. I hope that posting about this fascinating woman this month will help the cause of truth and justice.

This is one of the best and shortest interviews that expands upon all her accomplishments, which may dazzle you.  He believes she was the most credible investigative reporter of her time. She had respect for her reportage, her Broadway column, and so much else.

I read the books I feature here at Mistress Manifesto from cover to cover. I also listened to a number of YouTube videos which were of Mark delivering lectures, and so, not only did I feel well situated in my understanding of his theories and research, but also felt I had to promote his desire for Justice for Dorothy. The man Shaw thinks poisoned her with a drug overdose, or set her up to be poisoned, has died.  But Shaw is open to hearing from anyone who has more information.

Missy

WHAT A 20/20 TELEVISION INTERVIEW WITH JUDITH CAMPBELL EXNER REVEALED

I watched this interview, which aired in December 1996, and included questioning by Barbara Walters, an interview with columnist Liz Smith, and other women.  These women were the pioneers - the very few women - who were in important positions in the media at the time.  You can find the interview on YouTube.  I'm not posting it here because it was broken into segments and the quality of the video is low.

First Judith Campbell Exner was called "a dying woman" though she looked great.  She did die a couple years later.

She said she had dated Frank Sinatra briefly.  Then Sinatra introduced her to JFK.  She was 26 years old.  This was before John F. Kennedy was elected and she thought she was his only "other woman."  Since she had left a marriage in which her first husband, who she married at 18 years old, actor William Campbell, had never been sexually faithful to her, she felt torn about now being "the other woman" but John F. Kennedy's smiling eyes and charisma, were irresistible. This was not a light decision for her.

John called her every day while campaigning on the road.  She showed documents including her schedule book in which she recorded that on March 7, 1960, she spent her first night with him as a lover, at the Plaza Hotel in New York.  Shortly, on April 6/7 of 1960, J.F.K. asked her to arrange a meeting with Sam Giancana, a Chicago Mafia boss, to help with his campaign.  To me this proves that the man himself was involved in getting the Mafia to help him in his election, something in very many films and books is put upon his father, the former Ambassador to Great Britain, Joseph Kennedy. Until this reveal, I though the father's machinations were not known to his son.  J.F.K also showed her a sack of money and asked her to take it to Sam.

This is what Judith has to say about her culpability.

"Everyone expects of me to have greater judgement that Jack Kennedy and this is what always amazes me that I should have been suspicious.  I trusted this man.  I loved this man."

C 2020 Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot

JUDITH CAMPBELL EXNER's LAST STAND

PEOPLE : DARK SIDE OF CAMELOT : JFK and THE MOB



EXCERPT:  "I lied when I said I was not a conduit between President Kennedy and the Mafia," says Judith Campbell Exner, the same woman who first shocked the nation twelve years ago with the revelation that she had an affair with President while he was in the White House.  "I lied," Exner continues,"When I said that President Kennedy was unaware of my friendship;s with mobsters.  He knew everything about my dealings with Sam Giancana and Johnny Roselli because I was seeing them for him.  I wouldn't have been seeing them otherwise.  And I would never have known mobsters if it hadn't been for Frank Sinatra."

SUSAN BERMAN'S LADY LAS VEGAS - AUTHORSHIP AS LEGACY

  You may have just recently heard of a woman named SUSAN BERMAN, because a man named Robert Durst's on trial for her murder, years after it happened.  The new evidence that was revealed in a documentary called THE JINX, involves a secretly recorded confession as well as letters sent in the U.S. Mail.  Durst comes from a very wealthy New York City real estate fortune family, like Ivanka Trump, and like Ivanka's husband, Jared Kushner.  The Durst family has avoided the controversy.  Durst's money provides him the lawyers.





Reading some news articles about the trial, after having watched The Jinx, I learned that Susan Berman supposedly took a loan from Robert, who she had been good friends with since they met as students at UCLA.  She was an author who was perhaps not able to depend on her income as a writer to pay her bills.  So I wondered if she was a good writer.  I read her book LADY LAS VEGAS and thought she was an excellent, creative non-fiction author.  She managed to have a bit of her and her family's story, since her father was instrumental in the development of Las Vegas, woven through later chapters about the development of the town famous for "What goes on in Vegas, stays in Vegas." 


Here at Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot, Virginia Hill, who was the mistress of Ben Siegel, the subject of the Warren Beatty film, Bugsy, credited with building the Flamingo Hotel in the middle of nowhere, was covered in March 2013.  Well, Susan's father and associates took over the Flamingo when Siegel was gunned down in Los Angeles while Virginia was out of town.


Susan, may she be resting in peace, left Vegas as a child, after her father died young of natural but stress related cause, and then her mother had a mental breakdown and eventually commited suicide.  Because of her family's participation in Organized Crime, her murder has been blamed on the Mob, rather than Durst. Was she really a woman who knew too much for her own good?  The Susan in this book was not associated with Organized Crime herself.  On the other hand it has been claimed that because of her family background, Durst was able to confess to her that he killed his wife, Kathy, also a long missing person that there is likely a murder mystery that may involve Durst.  After she was left an orphan, her guardian became her dad's brother, her uncle with a big gambling problem.  She left Vegas and eventually lived in Los Angeles.


As an adult, gone from Vegas for 40 years, and distanced from it though the years and therapy, though with very fond memories of her childhood there as the only child and daughter of Davie Berman, credited as a builder of the town, she went back.  The part about going to the family home in a suburb that had been turned into a law office, her old playhouse in the back yard still there but used for storage, was a bit of a heartbreaker.  Always in her memory as a good time in her life, proud of the achievements that her dad had made, Vegas had changed so significantly it was hardly what she'd remembered as an insider behind "American's Neon Oasis."


There are other books by and about Susan Berman, but I thought my readers might be interested in this one because of some of the people she mentions in the book who have been mentioned here at Mistress Manifesto BlogSpot.  Besides Ben Siegel and Virginia Hill, she mentions Elvis Presley (who sang happy birthday to her), Liberace, and Howard Hughes, who bought hotels and had a mistress in each of them.  We covered Scott Thorson, who Liberace Kept, here in October 2012, and Howard Hughes's Mistress Faith Domergue in May of 2014.  (The Mistresses mentioned here do not include Faith!)


To find these people in this blog, try running a search for their names in the search feature on the sidebar.


Missy.

MARITA AS OFFICIAL MISTRESS FOR GENERAL MARCOS PEREZ JIMENEZ

EXCERPTS From the book "MARITA"

ON BEING THE MISTRESS OF GENERAL MARCOS PEREZ JIMENEZ

page 114)

"I would be Marcos' official mistress, a not unpleasant thought.  I enjoyed his company.  He planned to spend most of his time with me, though it was obvious that he would not divorce his wife.  He had considered brining me into his home on Pine Tree Drive since his wife lived in Lima, Peru, most of the time, bust she visited hum often enough that he could not risk my being there.  Instead he would use my place and our relationship to relax in a way he had not been able to previously.  He also planned to change his life, enter, at least for the immediate future, into a relationship that as committed....

The relationship with his wife (and children) was similarly distant.  Sex with his wife was a duty in Latin America, a mistress is for physical pleasure, but enjoys the privileges of a wife.  Both are compatible so long as neither objects to the arrangement each knows to exist.

page 115)  For both religious and financial reasons Marcos would not divorce his wife.  In their world, it was natural for them to stay together.  She had wealth, servants, every luxury she might desire.  He did not flaunt his mistresses or embarrass her with his intimate activities.

page 116)  I was delighted with the house.  I agreed to the arrangement and Marcos arranged a celebration of our new status in our new home.  I thought it was a house warming.  He and his friends considered it a formal announcement of my becoming the General's mistress.  The only difference between the event and a wedding reception was that there would be no wedding ceremony preceding it.

It was a odd evening.  The happy couple was feted and toasted by almost fifty (50) men on Marcos birthday.  (He gave her a special ring to seal the deal.)  He slipped the ring from his finger and placed it on my own, a sign to all his followers that I was to be treated with greater respect than his wife.  It was also a final, visible sign that I was his possession.

page 124)  (December 1962 - Marcos was to be deported to Venezuela via Robert Kennedy, U.S. Attorney General based formally on the theft of $13 million he tried to smuggle out of that country on his last trip.  He waited in jail and lost 40 pounds.  He paid the guards $200 a day to use the phone to call her.

page 125)  (December 1963 Marcos had to leave and she arrived at the airport only to see an emaciated man being led up a ramp to the plane in handcuffs.  She ran down the runway with their daughter, Monica, in her arms crying but was led away in handcuffs...)

And a week after Marco's extradition, the rug was pulled out from under me.  I lost everything - my home, car, Monica's trust, everything.... I was broke.  I was homeless.

MARITA LORENZ : MISTRESS OF FIDEL CASTRO (and then GENERAL MARCOS PERES JIMENEZ) TURNED CIA COLLABORATOR - MISTRESS OF THE MONTH

UPDATE NOVEMBER 29 2016 FIDEL CASTRO has DIED
NY TIMES= SHE NEARLY ASSASSINATED HIM - MOURNS DICTATORS DEATH


UPDATE JANUARY 2016 !  ACTRESS JENNIFER LAWRENCE WILL STAR AS MARITA LORENZ in a new biopic film! DAILY MAIL UK - JENNIFER LAWRENCE AS FIDEL CASTRO's TEENAGE LOVER ASSASSIN UPCOMING BIOPIC 

Excerpt:

According to THR.com, the film titled Marita will tell the story of how the German met Castro in 1959 and began a relationship with him when she was 19 years old.

She became pregnant with his child and later left Cuba for the U.S.

She was then recruited by the CIA and returned to Cuba in 1960 in a mission to assassinate Castro, but, legend has it, love won out.



The German Edition of Marita's memoir.
DEAR FIDEL link here
book is by Marita Lorenz and Ted Schwarz

MARITA LORENZ
( born August 18, 1939 in Bremen Germany )

 

As the United States attempts to thaw trade relations with Cuba, as Raul Castro, younger brother of Fidel, rules the small island country only 90 miles from the tip of Florida, my thoughts turned to MARITA LORENZ, who was Fidel Castro's Mistress very shortly after the Cuban Revolution that he lead in 1959 when he was 33.

MARITA LORENZ's book, published in 1993, is a love story and spy story as well.  For some reason, there have been a lot of notorious mistress-spies, but how many of them have been witness to key events in the President John Fitzgerald Kennedy assassination plan and spoken out about it?

This month as you read the book excerpts I've selected and watch a video, you may, like me, think "but this woman isn't all that beautiful or all that charming really."  But then there are so many mythologies and stereotypes about mistresses to bust.

Reading her words and hearing her words and how she got involved in world events and characters from the CIA and the Mafia, I'm struck that Marita comes across as hard, less Mati Hari, and more Virginia Hill. (You can read more about these women who have been Mistress of the Month here using the Google search feature embedded in the sidebar of this blog or by going through my archives.)

So here is the short short story.

Marita was not Cuban or even Hispanic.  She was raised in Nazi Germany by an American mother with her much older German father, the captain of a pleasure cruise boat he owned, an absentee father. During World War II Marita was raped by a child predator who went to prison for 39 years for it.  Though not Jewish, she and her mother suffered in Germany during that era. Thoughout a turbulent adult life, it was her mother who advocated for her and tried to save her.

In her teenage and young adult years she traveled on the boat with her father.  At the time she met Fidel she was living in New York City between cruises and aimed at secretarial school.

Not long after the Cuban Revolution, on February 27, 1959, her father docked his boat as was usual at the Havana harbor.  It may have been the first boat to do so after what came down.  Fidel Castro and some of his revolutionary companions boarded and stayed for a beer.  Marita, a competent hostess and boatwoman at that point, reminded them that on the boat they were not on Cuban soil, served up the beers, and had an instant mutual attraction with Fidel.  A picture of her and Fidel at that meeting that circulates in the media has her father, who was sitting next to her, cut out of it though; he was there.

Back in New York, she got the call to come to Cuba at Fidel's expense while her father was out of town again.  She went, a virgin but for her childhood rape, found herself to be a hidden, almost locked away mistress to Fidel at the Havana Hilton, crazy in love but always waiting for a visit or a summons, not quite a sex slave but there for sex and whatever relationship they could develop during his visits.  The married Fidel professed to love her and she him, they had a mock wedding ceremony, but when she discovered pregnancy had resulted from their amorous trysts, it was a huge problem.  Before she could give birth naturally, she found herself drugged and taken to an unknown location where she was prematurely delivered of a baby, told it had died or had been aborted, and was soon removed back to New York, an emotional wreck. 

Of these events Fidel later denied any knowledge.

Understandably bitter and confused emotionally, Marita found herself recruited by persons associated with the CIA who wanted her to go back to Havana and Castro, to seduce him and poison him and kill him.  She made the trip but could not go through with the plot, which Castro suspected.  She couldn't go through with it.  She loved Fidel and she wanted to know what had happened to her baby.  Her trainers were livid with her for not killing him.

At this point, through all of this experience that was horrible and shocking, Marita must have found herself unable to think straight.  Another woman would have, at such a young age yet, found some way to redirect her life to more truly loving companions.  But chaos and turmoil continued to be attractive to Marita, and before it was all said and done, she would find herself doing clandestine work for others. Training to be a killer and spy at Camp Perry, Virginia, at age twenty, she had learned to fearlessly parachute from planes and did target practice with Fidel's picture the bulls eye.

She went on to become the mistress of another Hispanic dictator, Marcos Peres Jimenez, who was deposed from Venezuela, while he was living in Miami, and had a daughter by him also, a daughter who lives in the United States. At the time he was considered to be an enemy of Fidel Castro.  Unlike the experience with Fidel, who was committed to the poverty of Communism, she and Marcos lived the life of wealthy exiles - for a while.  She was recognized as his official mistress by his friends.  He refused to let her work.  After he was returned to Venezuela, she chased after him and found herself to be an inconvenient woman again. Sometimes penniless and on the run, she even found herself with a young daughter living in the jungle with a native tribe. 

During a return to Cuba many years later, in 1981, Marita Lorenz learned that the son she gave birth to is alive, a doctor, and was raised by a professor and his wife; Castro has known where he was. Fidel's invitation, that she could live in Cuba, was repeated. 

Perhaps most interesting is Marita's testimony in this book about the JFK assassination and the fact that it was a conspiracy, one she was to take part in. 

Cliffhanger!

I hope you will find the book excerpts I've selected this month illuminating!

Missy


C 2015  All Rights Reserved Mistressmanifesto.blogspot.com  Missy Rapport

A BLOG DEDICATED TO BUGSY AND VIRGINIA

A BLOG DEDICATED TO BUGSY AND VIRGINIA  some great pictures!

FRANK COSTELLO AND VIRGINIA HILL KNOW NOTHIING : THE KEFAUVER HEARINGS 1951

THE MOB

VIRGINIA HILL : THE FLAMINGO : ONE OF THE MOST INFAMOUS MISTRESSES EVER!

Virginia Hill: She really liked BAD BOYS, some of the Baddest... 

Born in 1916, Virginia became entangled with bad boys in her teens.  Those where Great Depression years and she came from a violent childhood.  She may've been struggling for survival. She moved from Marietta, Georgia to Chicago to New York to Los Angeles.
At 18 she became a courier for the organized crime syndicate - The Mafia - and so Virginia became a mobster herself.  She wanted to be an actress. 

In those early days of the 19th century it was a rare woman who was so promiscuous. Had she been molested or raped as a kid?
She made her own commissions from carrying cash around.  Some say she also went to Mexico to negotiate a drug route.

She slept around with gangsters.  Though she earned her keep, she had boyfriends who were generous.  She was considered beautiful, capable, strong willed, and, well, she had red hair.  So she got called "The Flamingo."

She is most known though for her relationship with the traditionally married Ben Siegel, also called Bugsy because he was said to go crazy at times, a man who was violent, but not to his wife and children, and who, though excellent at compartmentalizing his life, eventually left his wife for her.
By 1943 Virginia lived with Ben in luxury in Beverly Hills waiting on the divorce. 

When Siegel dreamed of a Las Vegas as we known of now, and decided to build a a hotel called "The Flamingo," which was named after Virginia, she was on his team.

Ben, who hated his nickname of Bugsy, was a business man whose dream went over budget.  He as also a hit man. 
How much Virginia knew really is unknown.  Called The Queen of the Mob, she claimed not to know much at all but in 1951 she was summoned to testify by the Kefauver Rackets Committee where she denied a lot and used some foul language to shock everyone. 

Was she in on the fact that Ben was to be murdered himself? She wasn't in Los Angeles when he was killed.  Maybe she was tipped off.  Maybe she was shocked.  Maybe she had just lost the best thing she'd ever had going.

Eventually Virginia fled to Europe as a tax evader.  She married a ski instructor named Hans Hauser and they may have had a son.  In 1966, with that relationship failed and no hope of returning to the  United States, some say still heartbroken over Ben, she took a heavy dose of sleeping pills and was found dead in the snow on the ski slopes of Salzburg, Austria.  You see, most people don't kill themselves outdoors with pills so some people thought the mob had caught up with her and forced her to take the pills. 

Dead at the age of 49, Virginia Hill had lived many years full of intrigue and betrayals.

Of great fascination, there have been television movies and then some depicting their relationship.  One of the best stars Warren Beatty and Annette Bening.
C Mistress Manifesto / Missy Rapport  2013  All Rights Reserved