Lucien Sarti

Lucien Sarti (born circa 1931 in Corsica, died April 27, 1972 in Mexico City) was a drug trafficker and killer-for-hire involved in the infamous French Connection heroin network. He was named on the television series The Men Who Killed Kennedy, as well as in a deathbed confession by former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt, as one of the men who shot at U.S. President John F. Kennedy in Dealy Plaza on the day of his assassination. The series aimed to critically analyze the evidence in the assassination and attacked the Warren Commission conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone in killing Kennedy.

In one of the late episodes of the series, aired in 2003 on The History Channel, French prisoner Christian David named Sarti as one of three French criminals hired to carry out the assassination of Kennedy on November 22, 1963, when he was interviewed by author Anthony Summers. David's account was corroborated by Michele Nicoli, a former associate of David's who is currently in the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's witness protection program. Sarti was the only man David explicitly named, as Sarti had been killed by police in Mexico City in 1972. The trio had all been working for heroin trafficker Auguste Ricord, a known client of the Marseilles underworld, at the time of Kennedy's death. Writer Stephen Revelle, the man who named Sarti on "The Men Who Killed Kennedy", said that Sarti was the one who had fired from the grassy knoll and hit the president in the head. Journalistic and police sources in Paris and Marseille told Revelle that Sarti was known as an extremely daring and reckless man, known and despised even by his own associates for taking enormous chances; but that the willingness to take these chances was what made him such a successful drug trafficker and assassin.

Further reading

• Davis, John H. Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. New York: Signet, 1989. ISBN 0-451-16418-0
• Kruger, Henrik. The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence, and International Fascism. Boston: South End Press, 1980. ISBN 0-89608-031-5
• Marrs, Jim. Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy. New York: Carroll & Graf, 1990. ISBN 0-88184-648-1
• Mills, James. The Underground Empire: Where Crime and Governments Embrace. Garden City NY: Doubleday, 1986. ISBN 0-385-17535-3
• Scott, Peter Dale and Marshall, Jonathan. Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. ISBN 0-520-07312-6
• Sterling, Claire. Octopus: The Long Reach of the International Sicilian Mafia. New York: Simon & Schuster (Touchstone Edition), 1991. ISBN 0-671-73402-4

External links

• Biography: Lucien Sarti
• The Men Who Killed Kennedy - an article on the TV series, which mentions David's claim of Sarti's involvement.
• The Corsican Connection - a page which explores the possible involvement of the Corsican Mafia in the assassination of John F. Kennedy
• Lucien Sarti at Find a Grave