Mobster Johnny Roselli and MK-ULTRA

From The Man Who Knew Too Much, by Dick Russell (Carroll & Graf, 1992) pp. 381-82:

... [Richard Case] Nagell has consistently stated that organized crime had no direct involvement in the assassination. ...

Despite Nagell's disclaimer ... there was far too much evidence for me to disavow the likelihood of Syndicate involvement. Yet the Mob, by itself, simply did not have the power to tamper with all the physical evidence eventually used to incriminate Oswald as a lone gunman - or the autopsy results on the president's body. ...

The CIA's security officer for Artichoke was Sheffield Edwards. Cooperating closely with the CIA was the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (VBN). Charles Siragusa, a Military Intelligence officer during World War II and later the FBN's liaison to the CIA, helped set up the California "safe houses" where numerous MK-ULTRA experiments were conducted on unwitting subjects in the 1950s. Then, in 1960, Edwards approached Siragusa about another project. Given Siragusa's vast knowledge about members of organized crime, Edwards now wanted him to recruit teams of money-for-hire assassins to assassinate foreign leaders. Siragusa would tell the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1975 that he had turned Edwards down. The Office of Security chief then turned to a Howard Hughes aide, ex-FBI agent Robert Maheu, who in turn went to Sam Giancana and John Roselli to find Cuban exiles willing to eliminate Castro.

The initial anti-Castro plots involved methods developed in the CIA's Technical Services Division, where Dr. Sidney Gottlieb had supervised the MU-ULTRA mind-altering program since its 1953 inception. ...

So what we have here is a frightening crossover. The same men who had spent more than a decade overseeing and implementing mind-control techniques ... became the very men who propelled forward the CIA's covert assassination squads. ...

The Senate Intelligence Committee, in describing Gottlieb's MK-ULTRA program in 1976, reported: "By 1963 the number of operations and subjects had increased substantially." ...