Collection of Assorted Newspaper and Magazine Clippings: Jfk Assassination, Conspiracy Theories, Etc

Read from the scan by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word.

# The Mystery Tramps in Disguise.

WILL DICK GROSSMAN, the corrector

turned into a lawyer the list of acquaintances

in his life which were from elsewhere

around with a set of possessions taken by

the press photographers at Dallas.

November 22nd, 1901

The photos show three men, short, medium and tall, being led through Deley Phen by two Dallas policemen in the Dallas County Sheriff's Office. The cops released the men without, apparently, getting their names. "They were just tramps," the policemen were supposed to have said, "and we let 'em go."

For years, buffs looking for "the real killers of JFK" have been trying to identify the tramps Richard Sprague, a computer scientist from New York and former board member of the Committee to Investigate Assassinations, has maintained that one of the tramps is a Minuteman from Washington D.C. named Fred Lee Crisman. Sprague dubbed the tramp of medium height "Frenchy" and it was Sprague who fed Ramparts and the New York Times the intelligence that "Frenchy" bore a startling resemblance to a widely circulated police sketch of a man wanted for the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968.

In 1972, after years of trying to link up the tramp photos with, mainly, antiCastro Cubans and some of their American compatriots, the buffs started scanning photos of the actors in the Watergate scenario. Could any of the Watergate crowd have been in Dallas? And if so . . . Eurekal, they said, the short guy was E. Howard Hunt and the tall one was Frank Sturgis.

The short man does bear a resemblance to current photos of Hunt, to be sure, but the tramp photos were

Sturgis is obviously Latin. Furthermore, there is a great distance in height between the tail and the short trumpets. The tall trumpet seems to be at least eight inches taller than the short one. Sturgis seems to be no more than two or three inches taller than Hunt.

To the bulbs wanting to believe, however, the photos were too good to drop. They "proved" a CIA complicity in the plot to kill Kennedy. Underground newspapers all over the country began to reprint the tramp photos, alongside those of Hunt and Sturgis, with the blatant assertions that the tramps were Hunt and Sturgis.

Two months ago, Rolling Stone had the tramp photos examined by the

Robert Blair Kaiser wrote "R.F.K. Must Die," after seven months of interviews with Siren Sirhan in the L.A. County Jail Kaiser, formerly a foreign correspondent for Time magazine, is now a freelance living in California.

probably not Hunt—that in the details in the forms photos of the short tramp were insufficient to provide Motton with an absolute basis for an opinion. However, reported Motton, "at least one definable characteristic appears to argue strongly against identity. This is the shape of the car." According to Motton, the helix of the car in the Hunt photos is concave and the helix of the car of the short tramp is convex.

All this seemed somewhat superfluous in light of Hunt's angry denials to me that he was even in Dallas on November 22th, 1963. I found Hunt at the Hotel Sheraton Russell in New York in November. He told me where he was on November 22nd, 1963—in Washington, at a meeting of some CIA officials who could corroborate his presence there. Hunt said he'd given their names to the FBI, which grilled him rather recently about his whereabouts during most major political crimes of the last 50 years. Hunt added: "I'd like you to tell the world I've had those FBI interviews, so that your colleagues in the media would put some pressure on the FBI to reveal the results of their investigations. Those investigations would help clear my name." Hunt promised he'd sue anyone worth suing who charged that he was in Dallas in November 1963 or part of a plot to kill JFK.

Hunt made similar disayowals on network TV and local TV shows during November 1974. Nevertheless, the tramp photos (with one of the tramps now labeled "Hunt") seem to have a life all their own, have become part of the collection of artifacts surrounding the JFK assassination mythology. Dick Gregory found the tramp photos circulating at the Assassination Information Bureau convention in early February, latched on to them (along with Robert Groden's Zapruder film blowup) and took tramp photos. Groden's blowup and Groden on the road.

Because Gregory is who he is, however, something of a folk hero who commands attention from the media, the Rocketeller Commission called Gregory to testify before it in Washington for a firsthand account of his charges. There Gregory stopped short of identifying the short tramp as Hunt but played the role of "aggrived citizen." It this isn't Hunt, said Gregory, then the government has an obligation to tell to who it is.