During the 1980 presidential campaign, a notorious Hollywood satanist was linked to a plot to murder the third Kennedy brother, uncovered documents show
David Gambacorta is a writer-at-large at the Philadelphia Inquirer. He has also written for Esquire, Longreads, The Ringer, The Baffler and The Marshall Project.
A day earlier, Senator Ted Kennedy had left San Francisco after campaigning for President Jimmy Carter, whose general election showdown with Ronald Reagan was inching closer. It had been a long, tumultuous year for Kennedy, who was then in his late 40s.
An informant had contacted the FBI office in downtown Chicago and explained that a plot to murder Kennedy was being set in motion. It’s a story that has never been told until now, a bizarre piece of history that became public only when I discovered records of the investigation that the FBI quietly released in June in The Vault, the bureau’s online FOIA library. The files outlined a scheme that supposedly involved money, drugs and the mob.
Across the country, meanwhile, Kennedy was wrestling behind the scenes with questions about his political fate. Supporters had once expected him to pick up his slain brothers’ mantle and make a bid for the White House, yet the 1972 and 1976 presidential races found Kennedy on the sidelines, immobilized by the specter of his 1969 car crash in Chappaquiddick that resulted in the death of a passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, and led to him pleading guilty to leaving the scene of an accident.
Aside from blurting, “They’re going to shoot my ass off the way they shot Bobby,” while on a congressional flight back from Alaska, Kennedy shied away from sharing his assassination fears with aides or family members. Instead, he tried to project an air of invincibility, or at least indifference. “I remember being in Iowa, and when we’d first go out there, the Secret Service would create this huge space between him and the crowd,” Shrum tells me. “And he hated it.
The FBI’s San Francisco office pulled records it had on LaVey dating back to the mid-’70s, when a tipster told the bureau that LaVey had purchased handguns, a shotgun and a rifle. Other files showed that LaVey had once supposedly been “interested” in joining the National Socialist White People’s Party, which had been known, in an earlier incarnation, as the American Nazi Party.
Two days after the search at O’Hare came up empty, agents flew to San Francisco, and made their way to the Black House. A woman who answered LaVey’s door told them that he was traveling, and wouldn’t be back for several days. Another whiff. The investigators warned her they had information that suggested “an attempt may be made on LaVey’s life,” according to the records. They encouraged the woman to get a hold of LaVey and urge him to make himself available for an interview.
LaVey checked his recent phone messages, and noticed that he’d received calls from the Chicago area on October 23 and October 27. But he told the agents that he didn’t know the identity of the caller and hadn’t tried dialing the number that had been left for him.
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