A Gemstone Darkly

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By Jim Keith

At a certain point, while researching my book on the Gemstone File, I changed my mind about it. Initially I had been very skeptical, but in something short of minor satori I became less skeptical and realized that virtually everything of importance that Bruce Roberts had said lo these 18-and-more years ago could be true. That is, the Mafia really could have been the ones behind the JFK, RFK and MLK hits, and Aristotle Onassis, while there’s not a hint of it in the standard biographies of the guy, could have been the Mr. Big ordering the hits.

That’s the thesis of Gemstone, in a nutshell, but it’s embroidered with any number of other different strange and unsavory events with the 24 pages of this samizdat classic, this Secret Letters of Chicken Little~dark mini-history of the twentieth century that has circulated hand-to-hand since 1974 or so. Why hadn’t I believed Gemstone to begin with? To be blunt, the thing reeks of paranoia and the spy biz of a man with no apparent connections to the intelligence (or less than intelligent) agencies.

Bruce Roberts, before his death (all deaths are mysterious in the world of conspiracy research, and Bruce Roberts’ death was at least as mysterious as the rest of the guys on the San Francisco obituary page the same day) wrote something on the order of 1000 pages of letters, purporting to expose the inner workings of the Mafia and the US government, and sent those letters to his mother and sundry other figures like Marshall Tito and Anwar Sadat. The letters existed and some exist; we have the word of Mae Brussell, Stephanie Caruana, and Paul Krassner on that. For my own part, I have yet to see a single page of the original Roberts’ letters.

All I have to go on is what the rest of us (aside from the above mentioned) have seen, namely The Skeleton Key to the Gemstone File, and a continuing bramble-laden correspondence with Stephanie Caruana, the woman who edited the Gemstone letters down from 1000 pages to a 24 page synopsis.

Caruana is a study in herself. I’d spent some time trying to locate her while working on the book, and had had no luck. And then, by accident, if there are such things, and this instance certainly strained credulity, I ran across her name and address. Caruana is very concerned that her address doesn’t leak out (she’s survived 18 years since she did the Skeleton Key, but since some of the principals of the Gemstone Files live, she’d just as soon remain anonymous) so I won’t give you any clues on this one; suffice it to say that she’s been doing other things since the Skeleton Key.

Caruana believes utterly in the truth of the Gem- stone File and believes Roberts to have been the bravest man she ever met. She thinks that I’m a dilettante who only indulges in conspiracy theory because I’m certain that it couldn’t be true一“but she has taken the time to answer any question I’ve had about the File. She also has 8 pages of Roberts’ original letters and an expanded 60 page Skeleton Key (with photos) that no one that I know has ever seen. When my book comes out from IllumiNet, those things may or may not be in it; probably not, she wants $4500 for photo-copies of those items.

In putting the book together, I began researching the individual events depicted in the Skeleton Key, and at a certain point things seemed to at least partially crystallize. The Skeleton Key, for instance, maintains that Howard Hughes was kidnapped by the Mafia and replaced by a lookalike. It turns out that everyone and his brother has speculated on the same thing at one time or another; Charles Colson, the 1RS, Carl Oglesby, lots of people. It’s at least as plausible as the other theories about what happened to Hughes.

Onassis was more difficult. I read half-a-dozen bios of the Greek tycoon looking for something, any-thing that would suggest that he was anything more than wily, and found nothing. But then connections finally started to fall in place and I found out that Onassis, while I can’t prove any wrongdoing on his part, hung out with Nazis, Mafia, and men who were identifiable links to the JFK assassination. You might even say that I felt I glimpsed a tentacle of the Danny Casaloro “Octopus.” These associates don’t absolutely prove that Onassis was up to dirty work that he’s portrayed as doing in the Gemstone File, but it did make the whole conception…quite plausible.

And then W. Scott Walker called me from Tahoe and tried to threaten me off from the book. He’s the publisher of a book (and I use the term loosely, since I’ve had a chance to peruse the thing) by Peter Renzo, called Beyond The Gemstone Files, It’s basically a crappy rip-off of the Caruana Skeleton Key that Renzo claims are the files that G. Gordon Liddy thought he had burned. Walker maintains that Renzo is ex-CIA and an ex-member of the “Fighting Tigers Assassination Squad.” He also implied that if I went ahead with my plans for doing a book on the Gemstone File that the Fighting Tigers just might have a reunion and use me for target practice.

I think the euv is loony, but who knows? That didn’t keep Liddy out of the Company. Greg Krupey tells me that he’s run into a reference to a “Fighting Tigers,’’ supposedly the hit squad who took out Kennedy witnesses after the assassination. Whatever; I’ve spent the advance and I have to do the book.

The problem, as I see it, was that Bruce Roberts was paranoid, which tended to cause him to interconnect and view everything as part of the Web. Al-though I’ve not seen his original letters, I’ve heard them described, and they sound…well, Caruana com-pares them to Joyce’s Finnegan9s Wake. That’s only a shade of difference from calling them crazy. Brilliant, but crazy, let’s say. In addition to the letters being rambling and manic, they were synopsized for posterity by Stephanie Caruana, and she turned out a Gem- stone that is flawed unsubstantiated at best.

The odd thing, though, is that I have the suspicion that Gemstone could be true. Roberts may have walked a thin line as he followed the thread of Mafia influence in international politics, but at the same time it is possible that he knew what was going on in the big conspiratorial picture.

That’s where I stand. I’m dickering with Caruana for some Roberts letters, and I’m putting the final touches on the book. And I ain’t (if you’re familiar with the Skeleton Key) eating any apple pie.

Jim Keith’s book on the Gemstone File is avail¬able from IllumiNet Press, POB 2808, Lilburn，GA 30226.

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