The Gray Alliance: How Ultra-Zionist Neoconservatism Took Over the American Deep State

Part 1: The Regime and the Syndicate

This post marks the beginning of my Gray Alliance series of articles, building on my own political science scholarship as well as the work of others—most notably Professor Peter Dale Scott. The articles serve a companion to the Gray Alliance podcast series that Max Arvo and I have released at the American Exception podcast. Consider each of these articles to be a working paper of sorts. I could—and eventually may—add more details on the source material. For now, I recommend that interested readers consult the cited texts for more details.

The Mystery of the JFK Assassination is the Mystery of the US Regime Itself

The JFK assassination remains officially unsolved. We cannot say precisely who ordered, planned, and executed the assassination. However, in the larger sense, we do know the guilty party. Thanks to the tireless efforts of investigators and activists, a vast amount of evidence has been compiled over decades. A heavy-handed cover-up is still ongoing after six decades and counting. Collectively, the cover-up—along with the forensic and historical evidence—points unmistakably to the guilty party. Who had the means, motive, and opportunity to kill John F. Kennedy, the most popular US President since pollsters began surveying the public? Who could have enforced a decades-long and still ongoing cover-up? The answer is obvious. JFK was assassinated by the imperial capitalist US regime.

The real mystery pertains to the actual nature of this regime. The generic political science designation of the US having, simply, a democratic regime type is obviously unserious. In large part, my own doctoral dissertation, later published as American Exception: Empire and the Deep State, is an answer to the question What kind of regime does the US have?[1] The answer is essentially in the title. The sovereign entity in the US is deep (obscure, oligarchic, and top-down), imperialistic (bent on dominating global politics and the international political economy), and exceptionist (operating in an interminable deep or unacknowledged state of exception to the rule of law).

When looking into the details of the JFK assassination, the mob—organized crime—has been accused of involvement or even responsibility by many observers. As a student of the assassination, I have typically found the mob-did-it theorists to be naïve in a particular way. Their tendentious reading of evidence to me suggests that while they can see through the absurd Warren Report, they still have an aversion to accepting the grim truths about American democracy and capitalism which the assassination exposes. If I may generalize based on my experiences: for mob-did-it theorists, the dark power which removed a president must somehow be outside of America’s “legitimate” democracy and the free enterprise system. The cognitive dissonance would otherwise be unbearable.

Professor Peter Dale Scott has a much more complex view of organized crime. Drawing from various historians and social scientists, Scott has conceptualized organized crime as being integral to the American deep political system—a typically unacknowledged aspect of governance which is extraconstitutional but can still exercise considerable, even decisive power and influence. Peter and his work are something of a paradox. Because he is ideologically and methodologically a liberal of sorts, he looked at the high politics of US foreign policy. If Peter had been in the mold of an orthodox Western Marxist, he likely would not have applied this approach to the study of the US regime, since Western Leftists—we can call them hyperstructuralists—typically treat “the state” and ruling class as monolithic. Some Western Leftist strands consider it correct and virtuous to look at “bottom-up history.” Both of these “Leftist” tendencies obscure the determinants of policymaking within the global capitalist hegemon. In sum, liberal notions democratic pluralism may be farcical. However, based partly on Scott’s influence, I argue that oligarchic pluralism prevails in the higher circles of power.

After spending many years writing about suppressed and unacknowledged political practices, including theretofore unknown clandestine operations—Scott published his 1993 magnum opus on Kennedy assassination, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (hereafter Deep Politics).[2] In the text, he argued that while the US does have the democratic state that we learn about in civics classes, there is also the aforementioned deep political system in which unconstitutional power can override or veto the democratic state.

This useful framework—along with contributions from other thinkers like Ola Tunander—influenced my formulation of a tripartite state theory to explain the US system of governance. The tripartite state consists of (1) the open, lawful, and deliberative democratic state; (2) the more secretive, hierarchical security state; and (3) the oligarchic, extra-constitutional deep state. Key democratic state institutions include US Congress and the US Presidency. The FBI, CIA, Pentagon, and NSA are key pillars of the US security state. The deep state consists of all those extraconstitutional institutions which allow for oligarchic rule in a nominal democracy. It includes the overworld of politically active wealth, the underworld of organized crime, and various nexuses between allowing overworld influence over the public state, the security state, and the underworld of organized crime. Collectively, the deep state allows for oligarchic dominance of state and society. Note that I also use the term deep state to refer to those obscure networks which comprise—or are protected by—the pinnacle of the covert or clandestine arm of the security state. While formally situated in the security state, these actors and entities are so responsive to oligarchic power and so unbound from constitutional oversight that cannot be considered mere elements of the security state, much less the democratic state.

As far as organized crime is concerned, in Deep Politics, Scott lays out a sprawling and persuasive critique of organized crime and its centrality to Dallas (the JFK Assassination). To better understand this kind of systemic corruption, one must employ unconventional methods relative to those of mainstream journalists and academics. Dallas involved actors and institutions that are not only obscure and opaque—they are vigorously suppressed in mainstream discourse. For Scott, this meant that the most important revelations within official investigations and reports are often those items which go unmentioned despite their obvious importance. He coined the term negative template to describe such pregnant omissions.

For Scott, the Dallas cover-up was of a piece with other major cover-ups related to organized criminal activity. In Deep Politics, Scott traces these cover-ups through several episodes. The first major exposure of a nationwide organized crime network came with Kefauver Committee investigation in the US Senate (1950-1951). The Committee’s investigations and widely-viewed hearings led them to the conclusion that there was “a Nation-wide syndicate known as the Mafia.” This ethnic Italian Mafia formulation came from George White, a notorious operative at the Office of Strategic Services, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, and the CIA.[3] White was deeply implicated in Operation X, Scott’s term for the long-running US intelligence agency protection of the drug traffic. As Scott argues, “[T]he ‘mafia’ presented [in the Kefauver Committee Report], far from being a revelation of Operation X, was virtually a cover for it.”[4]

The next major national incident involving US organized crime occurred in Apalachin, NY in November of 1957. Slate offers a good summary of the contrived conventional understanding of the event:

New York state troopers noticed a suspicious number of expensive cars with out-of-state license plates converging on the small town of Apalachin. The cars, it turned out, belonged to Mafia leaders from across America, who had come to Apalachin for a national summit meeting. The aftermath of the Apalachin Meeting would shed new light on a criminal organization that greatly valued its secrecy. It also forced the FBI to admit once and for all that the Mafia operated on a nationwide scale.

The US Senate’s McClellan Committee had been meeting since early 1957 to investigate labor racketeering. Famously, Robert F. Kennedy served as chief counsel and investigator for the Committee. According to the committee’s analysis, twenty-two of the 58 known Apalachin attendees “had been involved in either labor unions [including the Teamsters] or labor management activities.”[5] Rather than accepting the centrality of organized labor in the national crime syndicate, the FBI apparently accepted, grudgingly, a version of the FBN’s Italian “Mafia” model.

Drawing from his experience on the Committee, Robert F. Kennedy published The Enemy Within in 1960.[6] The book detailed various aspects of Kennedy’s service on the McClellan Committee. Kennedy posited a theory of the national crime syndicate that, contra the FBN/FBI Italian mafia model, placed the Teamsters in a central role. Kennedy also devotes time to discussing the “Vegas skim”—illicit financial flows that accrued largely to Lansky-connected entities. In sum, RFK was targeting a national crime syndicate that was functionally part of the US regime, even as very few national security officials understood this relationship. Bureaucratically, the partnership was rationalized with reference to the overriding existential imperatives of defeating fascism and then communism.[7] Additionally, the Syndicate’s essential monopoly on protected underworld enterprises generated vast sums of wealth for politically connected oligarchs.

The Teamsters were a crucial pillar of the Lansky Syndicate. With its influence and official protection expanding thanks in part to Lansky’s World War II partnership with US intelligence, the Syndicate spread further into every major region of the US. Dallas in the mid-1940’s was a textbook case. In 1947, a narcotics-trafficking Syndicate man and associate of Jack Ruby named Paul Roland Jones attempted to bribe a new Dallas sheriff, Steve Guthrie, in order to allow the Syndicate to operate freely in Dallas. Jones told Guthrie that the Syndicate was planning to use Teamster networks to “bring [Dallas] industry to its knees, and even the government.”[8] Jones failed in this 1947 attempt, but the Syndicate would eventually succeed in firmly establishing it operations in Dallas, with Jack Ruby playing a key role. As Guthrie later recalled, “Whenever I wanted to find anyone from the Syndicate, I went to [Jack] Ruby’s Silver Spur.”[9]

What then was “the Syndicate”?

This true structure of the national crime syndicate looms darkly over the history of the US global imperial era which began after World War II. The Syndicate’s origins stretch back at least to the early decades of the twentieth century. This is not the place to attempt a comprehensive assessment of the whole of US criminology. I will instead summarize some broad historical points about the mob—including the general chronology laid out in Peter Dale Scott’s writings like Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. In my estimation, his work is singularly brilliant and basically indispensable for anyone seeking to grapple with the opaque high politics of the empire or deep state or oligarchy or capitalism—whatever term or synecdoche we wish to use to refer to the obscure top-down sovereign power at the apex of the regime in the US-led West. A key point that is relevant to this discussion: the underworld of organized crime has long been an element of governance in the USA—an indispensable crucial element of actually existing capitalism.

During prohibition and in the 1930’s Meyer Lansky and his partner Lucky Luciano consolidated the major crime rackets and families into a national organization. In the 1930’s, the higher-profile Luciano went to jail. Lanksy seems to have used this opportunity to expand his operations and realize his vision. A crime writer at Cigar Afficanado offers a conventional account with useful errors:

On the surface, the deportation of Luciano seemed like a blow for the Mob and its plans of a criminal base of operations in Cuba, but the opposite was true. The real brains behind the plan was Lansky. At the Mob conference, Luciano had given Lansky’s plan his full approval and made sure each of the gangster bosses signed on. But Lansky knew that Luciano was headstrong. Since the 1920s, Lucky had made much of his fortune from the smuggling of heroin, and Lansky did not want the Mob to have anything to do with narcotics in Cuba. He saw it as a threat to his view of an empire built almost entirely on casino gambling (emphasis added).

We can rely on historian Alfred McCoy to correct the assertion that “Lansky did not want the Mob to have anything to do with narcotics in Cuba.”

After [Luciano] was deported from the United States in 1946, he charged his longtime associate Meyer Lansky with the responsibility of managing his financial empire. Lansky also played a key role in organizing Luciano’s heroin syndicate: he supervised smuggling operations, negotiated with Corsican heroin manufacturers, and managed the collection and concealment of the enormous profits. Lansky’s control over the Caribbean and his relationship with the Florida-based Trafficante family were of particular importance, since many of the heroin shipments passed through Cuba or Florida on their way to America’s urban markets. For almost twenty years the Luciano-Lansky-Trafficante partnership remained a major feature of the international heroin traffic. […] Havana was probably the most important transit point for Luciano’s European heroin shipments. […] Lansky owned most of the city’s casinos, and the Trafficante family served as Lansky’s resident managers in Havana.[10]

McCoy is an academic historian and unquestionably a top authority on this subject. Why do crime writers persist in clinging to discredited public relations-flavored renditions of Lansky operations—specifically their centrality to the global drug traffic? Perhaps a clue can be found in articles like one from Tablet entitled, “Gangsters for Zion: How Jewish Mobsters Helped Israel Gain its Independence.” The article mentions the crucial contributions of Syndicate men like Mickey Cohen and the de facto Syndicate CEO Meyer Lansky. Within the article, the author never found the space to mention that these men controlled the international drug traffic with the protection of the US national security state. I wonder why.

In addition to managing the Syndicate’s European heroin traffic, Lansky also profited from Mexican drug traffic. In the late 1940’s, Harold Meltzer established a lucrative drug trafficking operation in Mexico. Federal Bureau of Narcotics sources record that “[Meltzer] borrowed […] up to $50,000.00 from […] leading New York and Philadelphia racketeers, primarily Jewish, to finance the narcotic deal.” Meltzer, the FBN had learned from three disparate sources, was running a “million dollar narcotics venture for Meyer Lansky.” McCoy summed it up thusly: “Armed with his Jewish capital and Mexican contact (a diplomat to handle Mexico’s border police), Meltzer closed his [NYC apartment] in June 1945 and moved his family to Mexico City for the next four years.”[11]

In their indispensable book, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America[12], authors Sally Denton and Roger Morris summarize and explain how profits from Lansky’s Mexican drug traffic helped capitalize Bugsy Siegel’s legendary casino, the Flamingo. The Flamingo was not just the casino that essentially founded the Vegas Strip in 1947. It served as a seminal laundromat for vast sums of cash—not just from the Mexican heroin connection, but from other vice rackets across the United States. Such hot money was what built up a considerable portion of the Vegas Strip after 1948. Denton and Morris convey the historical significance of the gangster aspect of US capitalism in the post-World War II era of Empire:

Over the rest of the century, the city’s casinos thrived as centers for the laundering and investment of billions in drug profits, which had a historic impact on the course and control of American politics and business during the closing decades of the millennium.[13]

Beginning with Salt Lake City and Phoenix banks joining Lansky to back the Flamingo in 1946, hot money enhanced the profitability of the Vegas Strip, attracting capital to the Syndicate. A wide array of “legitimate” capital became intermingled with the Syndicate—Wall Street houses, the Mormon Church, University endowments, a top arms maker, union pension funds, various other major corporate interests, and a Caribbean bank secretly run by the CIA.[14]

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[1] Aaron Good, American Exception: Empire and the Deep State (New York, NY: Skyhorse Publishing, 2022).

[2] Peter Dale Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993).

[3] Scott, Deep Politics, 141.

[4] Scott, Deep Politics, 192-3.

[5] Scott, Deep Politics, 186.

[6] Robert F. Kennedy, The Enemy Within, 2017 ed. (New York, NY: Ishi Press, 1960).

[7] Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 166.

[8] Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 153.

[9] Scott, Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, 161.

[10] Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, 2nd Rev. e (Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books, 2003), 40.

[11] McCoy, Politics of Heroin, 42.

[12] Sally Denton and Roger Morris, The Money and the Power: The Making of Las Vegas and Its Hold on America, First Vintage Books (New York, NY: Vintage Books, 2002).

[13] Denton and Morris, The Money and the Power, 6.

[14] Denton and Morris, The Money and the Power, 6.