Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Android | RSS | More
In this explosive episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins dives deep into one of the most complex and mysterious figures of the Cold War era—Ricardo “Monkey” Morales, a Cuban exile whose life intersected with the CIA, the anti-Castro underground, Las Vegas mobsters, and even the JFK assassination.
Gary welcomes Rick Morales Jr., son of Monkey Morales, and author Sean Oliver, co-writer of the new book Monkey Morales: The True Story of a Mythic Cuban Exile Assassin, CIA Operative, FBI Informant, Smuggler, and Dad. Together, they unravel the incredible life of a man who was at once a patriot, a spy, and a killer.
Rick recounts growing up in Miami’s Little Havana, where his father’s shadow loomed large—rumored to have ties to the JFK assassination and known for his secret missions across the world. From escaping Cuba as a disillusioned Castro loyalist to training as part of the CIA’s Operation 40 assassination unit, Monkey Morales lived a life that reads like a spy thriller.
Sean Oliver walks listeners through Monkey’s covert missions in Africa’s Congo, his deep ties to other operatives like Frank Sturgis and Barry Seal, and the secret wars that connected Cuban exiles, the CIA, and organized crime. The conversation also explores how Monkey became entangled with Lefty Rosenthal, the Chicago Outfit’s Las Vegas gambling mastermind, and how his bomb-making skills were used in mob turf wars across Florida.
The discussion culminates with Morales Jr.’s chilling memory of his father confessing he was in Dallas on the day President Kennedy was shot—and that he had seen Lee Harvey Oswald in a CIA training camp. Whether you believe Morales was a hero, a villain, or both, his story weaves through some of the darkest and most intriguing chapters of 20th-century American history.
📘 Get the book: Monkey Morales: The True Story of a Mythic Cuban Exile Assassin, CIA Operative, FBI Informant, Smuggler, and Dad
🎙️ Highlights include:
• How Monkey Morales went from a Cuban intelligence officer to a CIA-trained operative
• The secretive Operation 40 and its links to the Bay of Pigs, the Congo, Watergate, and Dallas
• Morales’s work for the FBI and the CIA—and his dangerous double life in Miami
• His connection to mob figure Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal and the Outfit’s Florida operations
• A firsthand account from Morales Jr. about his father’s claim to have seen Oswald in CIA training
• The moral code of Miami’s Cuban bombers—and how it vanished when Colombian cartels arrived
clicj here to get the book, Money Morales: The True Story of a Mythic Cuban Exile Assasin, CIA Operative, FBI Informant. Smuggler, Dad
Listen now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast app.
Hit me up on Venmo for a cup of coffee or a shot and a beer @ganglandwire
Click here to “buy me a cup of coffee”
To go to the store or make a donation or rent Ballot Theft: Burglary, Murder, Coverup, click here
To rent ‘Brothers against Brothers’ or ‘Gangland Wire,’ the documentaries click here.
To purchase one of my books, click here.
Transcript
Speaker: [00:00:00] All right, well, hey, all you wire tappers out there. It’s good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. Uh. Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence unit detective turned podcaster now, and I have another story and we’re gonna talk a little bit about the JFK murder and a connection to it, and a little bit about Lefty Rosenthal.
Speaker: And you guys know that I know a lot about ref lefty Rosenthal because he was calling back to Kansas City every once in a while to our mob guys and, and so, so I’m really anxious to talk about this story, but first, let me introduce my guest today and I’m really excited to have these guys on here.
Speaker: I have Rick Morales, Rick Morales, Jr, actually, and Sean Oliver. Welcome guys. Well, thanks Gary. Love the show. So, uh, you know, I, I looked at the two chapters you sent me and, and learned about the book and, and a little bit about your lives and especially yours, Rick, and it’s, it’s just fascinating as hell.
Speaker: Rick and I were talking a little bit before you [00:01:00] came on here. We, I didn’t tape it or anything, Sean, and about I had, you know, I was a policeman and I had kids growing up and, and Rick, his dad wasn’t a policeman, but his dad was, was in that. Kind of a violent, kind of a uh, occupation, if you will, about bringing that edge of violence home to your family.
Speaker: And there’s no way to, you don’t, you know, you know, let it loose on them, but you’ve been in some violent circumstance. All day long, or Rick’s case, maybe his dad’s case, maybe for the last several weeks. And then he comes home and, and so it’s, it’s just an interesting, uh, family dynamic I always think. But, let’s start with you, Sean.
Speaker: Tell us a little bit about where you came from. I know you’re an author and you’ve been into wrestling.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Um, I’m from a planet called New Jersey. No, no. Strange. I think you’ve covered a lot of my residents in the past. I, neighbor, just a couple of weeks ago ago, I heard you doing Bobby Manna, who was very much a, a local of mine.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And my neighbor, Chuck Webner, who you may or may not know, not a mobster, [00:02:00] but I was a, I was a film and television actor for a long time. I, um, I directed television commercials. I, I was in entertainment and then I fell into covering professional wrestling. I wasn’t a wrestler myself. I know the physique has you fooled.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so I had a pro wrestling production company, and then through that, kind of fell into that world. And so my first few books when I started writing were covering that world. And then, um, wrote some novels and then, uh, my first foray into true Crime, certainly not reading it, but writing it came when I met a man.
Speaker 2: Beside me known as, uh, Rick Morales Jr. When I found out who his father was. And I went on a hunt for someone alive who could talk to me about Ricardo Monkey Morales. And that’s how I met Rick, I guess six years ago now, Rick. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Six years.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And we began [00:03:00] developing the story initially for television, um, as it’s, uh, really lends itself to an episodic.
Speaker 2: It’s, yeah, it’s so vast to the story, but COVID hit production shut down. We, it was impossible for anyone to produce anything of this scope. So about two years ago, I said to Rick, we had been past our last. Pass was, uh, Rob Reiner, I guess. And I said, Rick, I, let’s do this as a book. You know, I have an inn in the publishing world.
Speaker 2: I have, you know, multiple books out. Let’s tell your dad, we gotta get the story out. So that’s when we started doing this for publication.
Speaker: Interesting, interesting. And it is interesting story. We go from, uh, JFK assassination to Las Vegas, like I said, and, and a whole bunch of stuff down in South America. Rick, you gotta tell us about yourself.
Speaker: You know, Richard Morales. Yeah, Ricardo Mon Monkey Jr. I guess her dad was called Monkey Morales. So tell us a little bit about [00:04:00] your childhood. It had to be a little bit different than a lot of other childhood.
Speaker 3: Yeah,
Speaker: yeah. A little
Speaker 3: bit different than Sean’s, I would say. Yeah. I was, uh, born in Miami. I got older brother, younger brother, and a sister.
Speaker 3: I was born in 63 in Miami the same year. JFK gets second vaccinated. So I was there, but I wasn’t able to. To watch my dad do much ’cause I was only a couple of months old. So grew up in Miami. My dad and my mom left Cuba. My dad was a G two government agent for the Castro government when it took over.
Speaker 3: And then during the two years between 58, 59 or 59 and 60. Disillusioned as much as many were. He was trying to figure out which way the direction of the country was going, and eventually they, uh, tried to kill him. They, they put him on a hit list because his father was a judge for Batista’s regime and [00:05:00] had, his father was a judge in the Batista regime, so they were eliminating anybody that had to do anything with the Batist regime.
Speaker 3: So eventually he escapes through the Brazilian embassy. He spends like 82 days there with a bunch of other people. And, uh, eventually they’re taken out and he moves to Miami where he immediately goes to work for Cuban revolutionary groups. Because he’s, he is got the abilities. He’s a bomb maker. He is a master bomb maker.
Speaker 3: He is a sniper, so he’s been trained in the government and all those things. So he joins Cuban power groups in Miami trying to fight. Against the castor regime and, and the power. And that’s where he starts making his name for himself and then that leads to further jobs with government agencies. CIA what All this time we’re kids.
Speaker 3: We’re not aware in the early ages, like when I’m young, I’m not aware of what my father is [00:06:00] doing, but eventually there comes times when I see news stories on tv, they try to hide it from us, but they can’t. We hear stories from friends. I would go to friend’s house when I was young and they would one day be my friend, and then the next day they weren’t allowed.
Speaker 3: And when I would ask them at school, what happened is, your dad’s Monkey Morales, he was involved in the JF Kennedy assassination. That’s what everybody in Little Havana was saying. And so they weren’t allowed to come to my house anymore for fear of anything happening at my house that they would become, uh.
Speaker 3: Involved and heard or something. So I grew up with that stigma, you know, uh, as a child. Wow.
Speaker: Crazy. Well, like, do you guys, uh, Sean, did you did you get into investigating any of these pro anti-Castro groups down in Southern Miami? They were, it was Southern Florida. They were all kinds of little groups down there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so you’ve got Cuban exiles coming here [00:07:00] landing in the waiting arms of the CIA who are able to train arm, and with the intention of sending them back into Cuba to take care of Castro all the while keeping the US’ name. Off any documents. These, the, the brigade 2, 5, 0 6, uh, who were sent down for what became known as the, the Bay of Pigs failure, um, were, were, were shielded and, and, uh, masks as having been a part of, of any US operation.
Speaker 2: Right. So, uh, I mean, we didn’t even. Provide the air cover for them. That’s a whole other ball of wax. But, so here are these guys well-trained. 1500 Cuban exiles, well-trained demolition experts, snipers, intelligence counterintelligence in one city, in a very concentrated area in one city, all with a [00:08:00] common mission.
Speaker 2: And throughout this book, something that really differentiated. Those, the Cuban exiles and the crime that came with it, bombings, et cetera, was, and it differentiated from like typical Cosa Nostra or, or a lot of the other organized crime was that it was all mission based. This overarching mission for these guys in Miami was the anti-communism, anti-Castro movement.
Speaker 2: Even something like. Ratting, which if you’ve watched Scorsese movies, you know that, you know, that’s the, that’s a death penalty in this community. These guys freely gave information to authorities. Because they could go get that guy and the mission kept moving and you weren’t marked for death. When you gave somebody up, it was seen as one [00:09:00] mission.
Speaker 2: You fed some crumbs to the authorities, who by the way, were well behind the eight ball with trying to to learn the Cuban culture as it descended on South Florida, which was largely Jewish and Irish. Even the police officers, all the reports I have from those years. There’s no Spanish names of any kind until the seventies or right the turn of the sixties.
Speaker 2: So, yeah, it, it was, you had such a concentrated area and, and a, and a law enforcement that was not prepared to deal.
Speaker: Really? Now, Rick, that’s, uh, that’s Little Havana I think we’re talking about now. You grew up in what the, what’s known as Little Havana. That’s correct. Right. So, so your neighbors, I mean, how, how is it, you were all unified, I’d say, by this hatred of Castro and, and wanting to get back to Cuba.
Speaker: Is that did that continue out throughout your whole life? How did that play out in your life?
Speaker 3: Yeah, for the, for the people [00:10:00] that had come over from Puba, it was a singular objective. That’s why there were so many groups running around. The problem was the, the way some of the groups wanted to approach as versus others.
Speaker 3: Uh, you had some groups that wanted to be extremely violent towards any international company that was doing business with Cuba, but they were, they were bombing places. They were wanting to bomb places with people on it, like ships. They were trying to bomb ships that were in the harbors of Cuba and in Miami.
Speaker 3: My father was working with the FBI to make sure that that didn’t happen because then it’s an international problem. It’s no longer the US ’cause you’re allowing Cubans to use US soil to bomb international, uh, companies and, uh, and vessels and whatnot. So he was trying to stop the other factions from doing those things by supplying them with fake bombs.[00:11:00]
Speaker 3: Bombs that didn’t work. If he liked the target, he would allow it to be a bomb that worked. So he would then report back to his police handlers, there’s a bomb here. There’s a bomb there. This one’s good, this one’s bad. You gotta find this one, you gotta take that one out. And all those things were going on while he was playing every every side.
Speaker 3: Oh my God. So, yeah,
Speaker: man. Talk about walking at tight wire. And
Speaker 3: they, and my uncle, who is in the book Hector Corner, a lot, he ended up replacing bombs at businesses. They would always do it at night when there was nobody there in the office. The offices were closed. It was always make sure nobody gets injured.
Speaker 3: The groups that were trying to injure people were the groups that my father was trying to infiltrate and, and give info on and give bad munitions. There’s one time where they’re trying to fire a bazooka at a Polish freighter, and my dad provides them the rounds. But they’re dummy rounds that they’ve painted green because the dummy rounds are blue and they’ve painted them green to look like [00:12:00] good rounds.
Speaker 3: They fire it, it hits the ship, but it doesn’t explode. They can’t figure out why it didn’t explode. Oh, a dud, that’s too bad. Let’s get outta here. So they never sink the freighter and he knew it was a dud. And so he is, you know, if they find out he is the one that’s doing it, he’s, he is a dead man. You know?
Speaker 3: He’s a dead man. It, it, it didn’t matter. He, he got by that so
Speaker: well, maybe he was
Speaker 3: trying to help and fight at the same time, not create a national incident, but still be able to do things against Castro. But he wanted to do it with the backing of the US as opposed to some other Cubans that wanted just to freelance it and do whatever they wanted really.
Speaker: Which kind of, you know, gets us onto into the question of. CIA and training people, training the Bay of Pigs people and, and training other people. And, and your father monkey. And did he become known as Monkey Morales? By this point in time,
Speaker 3: he becomes the Congo and the Congo in Africa. Um, what happens is the CIA creates a team called OP [00:13:00] 40, which is a specialized unit of assassins pilots, bomb makers, fighters, you know, specialized.
Speaker 3: Certain things. And that Op 40 team is then used Inc. Conde Incandescent, and they’re sent to the Congo to fight against the Cubans that Castro has sent to the Congo to fight against the forces there. So they go to the Congo to fight, and there’s a very famous mission that Sean could tell you really better than I can.
Speaker 3: He’s done the, a beautiful telling of the story, but there’s a, there’s a rescue mission that they go on. Fighting against the local and the Cubans that are there to rescue missionaries in the Congo.
Speaker: Alright, yeah, Sean, tell us a little bit about that. Now, let’s, let’s set the scene. Castro sent soldiers over there to bring communism, correct?
Speaker: Correct.
Speaker 2: Yes.
Speaker: Africa, with the support of the Russians. Is that the
Speaker 2: Russians? Yeah, a hundred percent. Yeah. So this at the Belgian Congo, uh, and the United, the
Speaker: United [00:14:00] States, the CIA now has got. Some anti-Castro Cubans put together into this team and sending them against the Cubans over in, uh, who are working for the Russians.
Speaker: I tell you what guys this book is, is, yeah, is you gotta get it. This book has got some stories. Go ahead.
Speaker 2: You could see why there are 675 footnotes at the end of this book, taking up a fair number of pages. So, yeah, so what you’ve got is the, the Belgian Congo, right? You, you’re, we’re trying to, uh, we send an interest, we have an interest in this, obviously ’cause of the spread of communism at the time.
Speaker 2: And, uh, US boots on the ground is a, is a problem anywhere. You know, it needs sufficient justification so. Who can we go to? Well, our friends, the Cubans were tried to use them with Cuba and Castro. So this specialized OP 40 group is sent over to the Belgian Congo. Ricardo’s father, uh, [00:15:00] monkey is one of them.
Speaker 2: And, um. He’s, he’s put there and they discover on their own. They’re not told much about this. The windows are blacked out, takes a couple of days to get over there. They don’t know where they’re going until the wheels hit the ground. And rip Robertson pulls open a map. And, and tells ’em this is where we are.
Speaker 2: These are the areas we need to go to. And, uh, we need to, uh, we need to rescue this city, which, which has been over stanleyville, which, which had been overtaken by the rebels. Simba Rebels, very different enemy, uh, voodoo. I mean, they, they watched some hostages, spoke about being ensconced in a bank, looking out the window and having.
Speaker 2: The, the Congolese army, the good guys, uh, lining the bank, keeping the people safe, who were inside, uh, missionaries politicians, business owners from Europe and the United States, [00:16:00] and a witch doctor is sent down the street by the rebels. Doing some spell and they watched their protectors, the Congolese army drop their weapons and abscond.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And, and they were taken a hostage, obviously, so very different tactics than, than anyone was used to in the training of traditional warfare. So he gets over there and the story about the moniker monkey, it’s usually attributed to him because of the chaos he created. Or every organization for which he worked, which is certainly true, but the name was actually given to him by another Cuban in the Operation 40 Outfit.
Speaker 2: One of the villages they happened upon, everyone had been slaughtered by the rebels and there was this little Congolese girl who was alone and they were kind of just marching through and Morales took her, threw her on his back. Whenever there wasn’t, whenever they weren’t going to encounter fire, [00:17:00] she stayed with them.
Speaker 2: She slept with them, and he was always running around the jungle with a girl on his back. So one of the other soldiers says, Elon. Here comes the monkey running around with a baby on his back. So that’s how silly it really was when he first got that nickname. But then when he comes to, he’s in the US and everything’s going on in Miami, his connections to Lefty Rosenthal, which we’ll touch on.
Speaker 2: The press falls in love with the moniker and they begin to splash monkey everywhere because of the chaotic, whimsical, wild actions of Ricardo Morales. But it was really just because he was running around with a baby on his back.
Speaker 3: Oh wow. Great. Let me add something real quick there. Toria, the OP 40 team that they created was created in 61.
Speaker 3: This is 68. We’re talking about the Congo. This is that OP 40 team that’s run by Sturgis. Which connects to Hunt, which connects to [00:18:00] JFK. So remember that when for later on, when we discuss JFFK guys, that the OP 40 team is created immediately upon the Cubans arriving in Miami 59. They’re in 60 and 61. So by 61 they’ve got this OP 40 team already created.
Speaker 3: Barry Seale was one of the pilots. The original pilots, he was a smuggler in that movie. American made that starred Tom Cruise. So they’re the team and they’re control Sturgis, which works for Hunt, which then you see the connection with the team that gets put together and sent to Dallas. Which we can touch on later on.
Speaker 3: That’s Frank.
Speaker: Frank Sturgis. Right? Frank Sturgis. Correct. He was CI. He didn’t end up in Watergate. Also wasn’t, he wanted the Watergate burger. Correct? All of them are. That’s the whole thing. There’s a seam. Yeah. There’s a seam that runs through this. A, a string that runs through this whole thing. That’s all the way up to Watergate.
Speaker: It’s a That is correct. It’s a half of this. All of that
Speaker 3: comes from Op 40. Yeah. Sturgis [00:19:00] Hunt and that whole team. Created is, is created from OP 40, and that’s how they use all those Cubans in their specialties, snipers and bombers. Remember? Yeah. For the words.
Speaker: Well, now, uh, El Mano, as we would say in Spanish.
Speaker: Yeah, right? If I get that right. Rick El Yeah. You got it right? Yeah. Is how, how’s it getting all this publicity at the time? I mean, is somebody uh, has it got a publicity, an agent out here feeding the, well, actually y.
Speaker 3: A story.
Speaker: Sean,
Speaker 3: go for
Speaker: it
Speaker 3: man. You want, you want me to say it? Which, which story? How he’s getting the news because he is got an uncle who runs that, that works at the Herald and his girlfriend.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he had family in
Speaker 2: in the Herald uncle.
Speaker 3: My uncle, my dad’s sister’s husband is an editor at the Miami Herald at the time, and he is the first editor in Spanish in Miami at the time. And his second wife was a reporter for. Harald also, which [00:20:00] he eventually marries her. So he had connections at the Miami Herald and a lot, knew a lot of Cubans in power.
Speaker 3: So the stories would get out in the news the way he wanted them, the way he wanted to get out into the news. There you go. So there’s always a connection. Yes.
Speaker: Yeah. Which, which gave uh, Sean a lot of fodder to go out and find Yes. Stories. I mean, that’s invaluable, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2: The, the, the press, the, the old newspapers was definitely invaluable.
Speaker 2: But also it, this is a good time to write a book like this because of, because of the internet. My god, I sound like I’m 95 years old. The internet makes it all easy, but the access to documentation. Yeah, I know. CIA documentation, FBI, white House memos. We were talking earlier about the US trying to keep its fingerprints off anything.
Speaker 2: Clandestine like this, but still take action against Castro or in the Belgian Congo [00:21:00] and the lengths to which after the failure of the Bay of Pigs, the lengths to which they considered doing things to justify putting American boots on the soil in Cuba. I have a memo, a joint Chiefs of staff memo to Kennedy.
Speaker 2: Where they were considering sinking boatloads of incoming Cubans or setting off bombs in areas in Miami, basically killing Cubans that we’ve taken. Yeah. Assigning it to an agent from Cuba to justify going down there. Yeah. Red
Speaker 3: flying operation.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I, I recreate part of that memo in the book there. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Wow. Crazy. One of the things, Gary, I, I, if, if I may, uh, that we touched on before where Rick was saying the Cubans were great at. Knocking out targets without a body count. Ships, offices, warehouses. [00:22:00] That was one of the things that attracted Lefty Rosenthal to monkey. He was first working with Louis Posada, uh, another OP 40 who was on his way to Venezuela placed there by the CIA to run intelligence.
Speaker 2: In a, a friendly country at the tip of South America, you know, also mi just miles from Cuba. Mm-hmm. So lefty would always say the orders from the outfit, no body count. We need this taken out. We need, when they were trying to, you know, Florida was kind of an open. Flea market for organized crime. You had a genuflect at the bench of Santo, but then you could work Florida.
Speaker 2: So, um, when Lefty was down there to kind of get a stranglehold on the, the bookies for the outfit, Giana, one of the things that Morales, that attracted Morales to him was his ability to get very difficult jobs, done a boat in the water [00:23:00] a house the wall of a gambling parlor, just the wall, nobody else taken out.
Speaker 2: Those were the things that Lefty most respected about, uh, about Morales’s craftsmanship.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Adding to that, a lot of people don’t realize that they think that the drug wars and the Cuban wars and all that in Miami, but if you really look at it and you look at all those bookie wars and where they had a, they were, uh, tracking the bombings.
Speaker 3: They had a, the newspaper had a tracker on, and every day how many bombs have been placed and how many bomb had gone off, there was zero body count. Even Cubans killing Cubans, they didn’t kill anybody else. Like if you were going to kill somebody. There was, let’s say you were putting a bomb in a car and he brought his wife with him.
Speaker 3: The bombing was off. Mm-hmm. Child, children are off limits. Family members were off limits. Nobody, there was no, no, uh, collateral damage to say, so you, they had, it [00:24:00] was, they had this conscience about making sure that they didn’t kill innocent people. And you’ll see it, you can go back and Google. There’s no deaths.
Speaker 3: There’s nobody dead in most of these unless it’s a directed target that you’re trying to kill, which was what happened where it went wrong with the Orlando Let Air bombing. He was a Chilean diplomat working for the Chilean government at the United Nations, and they put a hit on him and the, there was a Cuban hit squad that went after him and his mistress was in the car with him.
Speaker 3: They blew up the car and killed them both. And my dad made a point of saying if I had been involved, that woman would be alive because we never kill women. We honor women. We don’t murder women. So yeah, there was code of ethics, code of conduct, but it still didn’t stop ’em from placing the bombs. But at least they had, uh, the code of ethics, the Cubans did in Miami at that time.
Speaker 3: That’s before, gotta have a [00:25:00] code. Man’s got even with a co code as they say. Yeah, there was a code. There was a code, yeah. Till the Colombians came in. Then when the Colombians came in, everything went out the window.
Speaker: I’ve read, I’ve read that, you know, and that no collateral damage of somebody was talking on some, somebody I was interviewing about, there’s very few bombings in New York City between mobsters like some other cities because New York is so.
Speaker: Congested and there’s so many people around all the time, and they do not like collateral damage. It, it brings down the heat like you can’t believe, right. So you’re talking about, uh, lefty Rosenthal. There’s a story in there I thought was kind of interesting when, uh, when El Mano first met, uh, lefty and then he, he had a friend, a guy named John Clarence Cook, who was a master jewel thief, kind of a, these mob guys, they move into another city and, and then they.
Speaker: They gather all the professional criminals around them. They’re just attract ’em like flies, I think. Yes. Because everybody knows that’s where the connections are to other cities and job big jobs and things like that. [00:26:00] So, can you guys tell us a little bit about that story that, that, uh, lefty and, and, uh, monkey Morales?
Speaker: I’m get started in
Speaker 3: Sean. Yeah. I’ll, I’ll get it started. I know there was, there was a robbery at the Museum of National History, I believe it was. Massachusetts, Boston, New York? No, the one in New York. New York. New York. Oh, sorry. New York. And, uh, they stole a bunch of diamonds and, and whatnot from, uh, from the museum.
Speaker 3: And they got away with it. The guy was nicknamed Murph to surf. Yeah. Who, uh, who did, uh, the theft and then, then my. Then Lefty becomes involved because he wants something
Speaker 2: so, well, John Clarence Cook was good friends with Murph, the Surf, and Alan Kuhn also, who is the other, uh, party responsible for the theft of the, the sapphire of India was the big jewel that was taken in that, in that theft.
Speaker 2: But the, the initial job that Lefty has Morales do is a cleanup of a [00:27:00] job that Louis Posada. Former CIA Operation 40 had blown, there was a newsstand, Alfie’s 24 hour newsstand, which was a haven for gamblers basically. And uh, and next to it was Epicure Food Market. Um, epicure is bombed one night, oddly.
Speaker 2: There’s no Cuban interest in this, so law enforcement that’s been tracking with the help of the Miami Herald’s bombing box score, which did appear in there, we just keep a count of all the bombs in the city. This was weird that and uh, dry cleaning, Jack Rands dry cleaning on Alton Road in Miami Beach.
Speaker 2: But what these two things had in common was. Chappy was a bookie. Mm-hmm. But also next to Epicure Food Mart was Alfie’s, which was a news stand where the bookies hung out. So now you have two. The proximity was, was interesting. Louis had goofed and bombed the wrong place. [00:28:00] So Lefty said, I need Alfie’s hit not epicure.
Speaker 2: So, uh, POS is headed to Venezuela to do his, uh, CIA work down there. So he introduces Morales to lefty. He says, I, there’s a glass partition in the back. I just need the partition taken out with a bomb. No body count. I need a reason for police to respond because they were all, there was already an agreement that once the police got there, they would go to the back and bust the bookie operation for Lefty and Company.
Speaker 2: So that’s the first job. Morales gets it done. And then the second one involves, uh, John Clarence Cook. Cook needs somebody bombed. They, uh, an, an address is provided. He just wants the property bombed front of the house. Lawn Landscaping Morales does it to his dismay. He [00:29:00] sees in the newspaper the following day.
Speaker 2: It was a policeman’s house that also violated a code. For him. And he was, he was pretty angry with Lefty. Um, lefty couldn’t share everything obviously with his, with the operatives he was hiring. So, um, he, Morales was initially told someone was bothering Clarence Cook’s son, but it happened to be a cop. So that, yeah, that, that’s the initial, that’s the initial introduction to John Clarence Cook into this fold, master Jewel Thief.
Speaker 2: And then, um. Eventually lefty hires morales to bomb Clarence Cook’s property, a boat in the, uh, in the, in the bay behind him, as well as a car in the, uh, in the, in the carport also.
Speaker: Yeah, he, and he was, uh, trying to line up the book. He’s kinda like Allah, Chicago. I remember I did a story once, a guy named Joe Ferry, Olin.
Speaker: He said, we need [00:30:00] to line up all these bookies, just like Capone had all the uh, uh, bootleggers lined up and Right, you know, kick up and so lefty. Then I guess he was probably sent down there with that idea to line up all the gambling that he could and kick back up to Chicago. So there was also. Go ahead.
Speaker: Mr. Morales along on one of those jobs, he doesn’t really know what he’s getting into, I don’t think. Right.
Speaker 3: That I, I don’t think my father knew why Rosie, why Rosenthal took ’em with him that day. But I’m pretty sure there a lefty knew that the guy was fencing the jewels from the occasion where they stole those, those diamonds, whatever were left over.
Speaker 3: So at some point. My father pulls out his gun and shoots him in the, and it goes through his eye, I believe. Hyman
Speaker 2: Gordon High. Gordon
Speaker 3: High Gordon was, it’s the fence. He’s the fence. And they shoot High Gordon. And, uh, there, I don’t know if they stole all the, I’m guessing there must have something from him.
Speaker 3: They wouldn’t have. [00:31:00] But we don’t, I don’t know what it was.
Speaker 2: This is also unique, uh, a unique time in his life Gary because. He’s for the first time and only time taking jobs outside of that overarching mission of the Cuban bombers. Yeah. This is organized crime now. It’s a contract job, right? It’s, it’s a, it’s a 10 99 yeah’s.
Speaker 2: It’s not. It’s not for the mission and when it ends. Something we had to talk about, Rick and I was well. Lefty, this is his stop before Las Vegas, as you know, Gary and, and his and his buddy Tony from, from Chicago head to Vegas. Why? Would an operative so effective as morales not have been asked to go, and the likely answer is whether he was asked or not to accompany him.
Speaker 2: He wouldn’t have because it was, [00:32:00] it was not mission-based. It was, it was a money thing and a job thing, and that was not really where he, and, and the, the violent Cuban exiles that, that had that overarching mission in. Mind. They didn’t do stuff like this, so he needed money. He was, he was back in Miami after the Con Belgian Congo.
Speaker 2: So he takes this job, he works for Lefty for the better part of a year, and then left Lefty moves on to Vegas and Morales stays there and works with the bombing roots there until he himself is placed as the one of the commandants in. Venezuelan Security Dsip, D-I-S-I-P, their agency. But you joined some other Cubans down there.
Speaker: Crazy. Yeah. Let’s, uh, let’s, let’s do one more story here. Let’s talk about, he saw Lee Harvey Oswald in a CIA camp. So, uh, yeah, let’s, let’s talk about that a little bit.
Speaker 3: Sure. When, uh, when, when I was about [00:33:00] 18, 19, this is about a year before my father was killed. So he had been in the Witness protection program for a little bit.
Speaker 3: They had put him up in New, in New York, somewhere in the city, in one of the boroughs. And he was unhappy. He didn’t wanna be there, he didn’t wanna live that life hiding and getting a job and whatnot. That wasn’t gonna work for him. So he gave up his witness protection program and he just went back to Miami on his own.
Speaker 3: And, uh, so. He, uh, used to show up. What he would do with us, with us and my brothers and whatnot would be, he would show up out of the blue. He would never call us and tell us I’m coming by or anything.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: We’d be playing basketball or something and take a shot, turn around, there’s the car parked, get in.
Speaker 3: There were a couple of times where we would go. He would take us out to the Everglades to teach us how to shoot, so we’d be out there shooting with him and there was a couple of occasions where we were shooting and stuff and whatnot. This last time that he took us. He, uh, [00:34:00] he was different ’cause he, he was worried that he had no protection.
Speaker 3: He had multiple contracts on him that were valid contracts of people that were trying to kill him in Miami. So I think, and he was also planning a book that he was writing, that was his exit strategy. He was gonna write a book about his life and he had already had been given new identity. He was gonna move to Spain with the royalties from the book and, uh, just disappear and, and go to Spain.
Speaker 3: That was his plan. So he was worried that he would never see us again and he could die. So he was talking about stuff that he had never talked to us about from his past, and he asked us to ask any question we wanted and I wasn’t asking a question ’cause I really wasn’t a fan. I grew up a little bit, miss, you know, oil and vinegar with my dad.
Speaker 3: Uh, but my brother asked if he was involved in the JFK shooting. He asked him straight up, did you kill JFK? And he said, no, I didn’t kill JFK, but [00:35:00] I was in Dallas that day. And we asked him, what were you doing in Dallas? He goes, well, I was sent to be a cleaning team. And that’s what we did. I took him to Dallas, waited for a phone call.
Speaker 3: The phone call we got was go home because obviously. The had been assassinated. So there was nothing for him to do. It was for after action if something had gone wrong, to eliminate people or whatnot. So that was the first thing he told us. And then the second thing he told us was like, we asked him, did, uh, do you think Oswald killed him?
Speaker 3: And he says, there’s no way that guy killed him. Because I saw that guy in a CIA training camp sometime before that assassination, and he couldn’t shoot. He could barely shoot. So he was a barely, you know, when they say a marksman in the Marine, that’s a guy sitting static shooting at a static target at a distance.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I’m a master sniper in the Marines, if you want to say that. [00:36:00] What we’re talking about is training people to shoot at moving targets. Mm-hmm. And at moving targets was what he was training on. He was not good. And my dad has a photo. Memory, you, his people from his pass will tell you he would drive through town and ride alongs with his cop friends and they would write down 40 tags and he would tell you the 40 tags later on.
Speaker 3: So one are they? If he saw you, he remembered you. Yeah. So I believe him when he says he saw him. Now, whether it was a year before, but. And it wasn’t at some camp where there’s thousands of people, it’s just five, six people that he’s helping to train. So he has that memory of seeing him at a camp training to shoot and maybe the CIA was just putting him out there so people would see him so that later on they would say, you know, I saw this guy training or whatever.
Speaker 3: Who knows? ’cause they, but they [00:37:00] were. That’s what he was doing. And he says At the static targets, yeah. Everybody that comes from the Marine Corps can hit a static target pretty good. But moving targets, that’s a different story. And also in real life, your heart’s racing, you know, it’s, it’s a, a sniper knows how to control the environment around them.
Speaker 3: And all the things that come into shooting. Oswald missed the easiest shot, the first shot. ’cause after that. You’re nervous, you’re reloading, you’re moving. The first one, you’re sitting there waiting, and so if you couldn’t hit the first one, which was closest and easiest. The next ones are impossible. So really he didn’t, that’s, and he told us there’s no way he would’ve hit ’em anyway if he was moving.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So
Speaker: now, Sean, did you, there’s been a lot of documents released from this JFK thing even more recently. Even more, and I know you probably spent hours and hours in these documents. What, what, what were you finding? Were you finding any of this in there? [00:38:00]
Speaker 2: The thing that the commonality in many of these documents.
Speaker 2: As of the, as of the publication or when we had to turn it in there were still 15,000 outstanding. I think after the last release there’s still about 5,000 outstanding in what has been declassified and we see what are the commonalities in all of them? Gary Cubans, they appear a ton in the declassified JFK documents, Cubans.
Speaker 2: Brigade 2 5 0 6 CIA, Tran Cubans and the Mob.
Speaker: Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2: And, um, you’ve probably seen read and covered a lot of, a lot of what I saw, like where they were again, white House memos about involving traffic ante Ana in, in, in, um, first in, um, uh, uh, in, in Cuba with [00:39:00] Castro. So there’s a relationship, there’s an off to the side relationship with our government and the mob.
Speaker 2: So their names appear the, the Cubans, it’s. It’s, there’s so much and so much has happened with blogs and vlogs and documentaries. You could just search JFK assassination on Amazon and you’ve got every Cucamonga theory in the world, and they all carry different weight. So it’s a story that continues to invite interpretation.
Speaker 2: Because there’s no real smoking gun, there are no real answers. The best you can do is use a little logic and extrapolate what would’ve been feasible and reasonable at the time. And, um, there’s never gonna be a smoke. You can release every document, Gary. There’s never gonna be anything on paper where a government implicates itself.
Speaker 2: Or someone working with [00:40:00] them.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Let me add something to that. There, there was some new releases on, uh, file, which is, that shows that the CIA, which is a Cuban file that they’ve been holding, the CIA’s been holding and now wanting to release, where it shows that the Ccia a had been monitoring Oswald for a period of time before and had been even going through his mail.
Speaker 3: So the CIA knew who he was. More than they let on, and that just came out. So there is, and there is a, the files that they’re holding onto the most are anything that has to do with the Cubans and that makes you wonder why those are the files that they hold onto the most because, and then the, what did they get rid of?
Speaker 3: You know, the burn bags must have been in, uh, you know, hundreds. Yeah. So, but there’s new files that show more CIA knowledge. Than they ever let on about what they knew about Oswald, how much [00:41:00] they followed Oswald, how much contact they had with Oswald. Were they working Oswald, were they just following him or were they directing him?
Speaker 3: Those are the papers that are all missing. The outer stuff is there showing contact and, and surveillance and, and all those things. You’re just never gonna find a document that says. We want you to go to Dallas and kill the president, you’re not gonna find it. It’s just not gonna exist. And everybody’s dead now.
Speaker 3: So they, they’ve achieved, they wait till everybody’s dead and they destroy the papers that connect. And now we’re left with. Speculation for the rest of our long lives.
Speaker: Very, very, very, very interesting guys. I would highly recommend you get this book if I know a lot of people out there are really interested in this, uh, JFK thing, but, but the whole story of Cubans and, and Castro and the CIA is just fascinating and I hope you get this [00:42:00] sold and made it into a miniseries for.
Speaker: Netflix because that’s, uh, your lips to God’s ears. It’d be a hell of a show if they do it right. You never know.
Speaker 2: An expensive show. Maybe you can finance it. Gary. I don’t know what, what? Yeah,
Speaker: I don’t know what your nest, your retirement,
Speaker 2: nest egg from. We’re always looking for
Speaker: help. Yeah, I know what you mean, man.
Speaker: All right, guys. Uh. Rick Morales Jr. And Sean Oliver, and the book is Monkey Morales, the true story of a Mythic Cuban exile Assassin, CIA operative FBI, informant smuggler, and Dad and dad. So it’s, it’s a hell of a story. Guys, I really appreciate y’all coming on. We appreciate you having
Speaker 3: us.
Speaker: All right. Bye.