It’s been 27 years since I interviewed Chauncey Marvin Holt in a Lemon Grove home. Over the intervening years, what Holt revealed in his intriguing life story has bedeviled me.
A documentary I would produce from the interview included many details on his role with organized crime, in San Diego and elsewhere, and how it played out in the most dramatic murder of the 20th century — the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963.
A more recent interview with attorney Michael Aguirre, former City Attorney for San Diego, about the confidential arrangement he had with Holt reignited my decades of interest in the late Holt’s story.
Just this past July, President Joe Biden released documents related to the JFK assassination, three decades after Congress ordered papers related to the murder to be released, although not all of the documents. With 4,684 documents still to be released, the final chapter of the murder has not been written, and there probably is a chance it never will be.
At the time of the June 4, 1997, initial interview with Holt, I was an investigative producer with 10news and was asked by friends and colleagues of Holt to “do his story.” This would be done outside my job at KGTV, the same for my team that included then weathercaster Mike Ambrose, who would be the voice of the documentary; Jeff Barrett, the excellent photojournalist who worked with me on the I-Team; and Anthony Davi, a North County based public relations specialist and an acquaintance of Holt who helped me write and produce the documentary.
My agreement with Holt was to tell his life’s story from A-Z — from bootlegging to keeping the books for organized crime figure Meyer Lansky to ending up in the freight yard behind the Book Depository Building on Elm Street in Dallas on that momentous November day.
Holt was adamant — he made me promise to tell his story and not focus exclusively on the president’s murder.
In two days of interviews, through the entire process, Holt never pointed the finger at any specific person or group for the killing but referred to numerous possibilities in play. While he never would say who he believed did the deed, he had a very strong feeling that the accused shooter, Lee Harvey Oswald, was set up.
I approached it as a journalist and not as an advocate for an alternative theory on the assassination. The goal was to lay out what Holt claimed he knew, providing what evidence he might have and let the viewer decide. During the entire interview I kept wondering if he was telling me the truth, impressed with how articulate he was and how he clearly laid out his story. He was amazingly consistent in his responses, even when I doubled and tripled back on a complicated question to see if his answers varied.
Holt made very clear he was “a company man,” playing by the rules of whomever he was working for at the time. Whether his employer was a U.S. intelligence agency or organized crime was not specified, but Holt said the information provided was usually on a “need to know basis.” He knew what he was paid to do; he did not necessarily know how others fit into the “job” he was hired for.
That was the beginning of my years-long mental wrestling match over Holt’s story. Was he a master storyteller or the real deal?
It is hard to dismiss the fact that eight days after we wrapped his interviews, Holt died of cancer. Immediately after we wrapped shooting on the second interview, he was sent to a hospice. Holt knew he was dying when he told his story and I believe a dying man’s confession bears significant weight when you consider the validity of what you are being told.
The documentary was called Spooks, Hoods and the Hidden Elite. Almost two hours long, it covered Holt’s life through the explanation of how he ended up in Dealey Plaza in Dallas the day the president was murdered. Holt first appeared on the national scene as part of a story in Newsweek when the November shooting was back on the front pages in 1991 with the release of the Oliver Stone movie “JFK.”
At that time, Holt had done two stints in prison and was likely strapped for money. Holt also had a working relationship with investigative reporter Hank Messick, whose book “Lansky” was the biography of gangster Meyer Lansky, who he depicted as a financial wizard. And who, Holt said, was his employer at one time.
The artwork for the cover of the documentary was done by the eloquent Holt. It was one of a number of skills and connections he claimed, some of which we were able to document. At the top of the list were ties to organized crime in San Diego and elsewhere. In 1981 he was accused in a murder for-hire-plot in Oceanside involving a loan shark. He also claimed he was a contract agent for the CIA, and he had demonstrated skills as marksman, engraver and accountant.
Aguirre would say in his more recent interview that “Chauncey, you know, he was someone that actually saw first hand how the deals were cut. You know, he was somebody that was right there at the right hand of Meyer Lansky.” Aguirre at one time worked in the U.S. Attorney’s office in San Diego and was familiar with organized crime activities in San Diego. It would be this experience that would eventually connect him with Holt. He would find that Holt “basically just lived on his own by his own devices.”
After Aguirre entered private practice, he would use Holt as a confidential source of information in a North County case involving organized crime at a time when the methods used by the mob were not widely known. Holt helped Aguirre draw a path of mob money moving into a legitimate business.
“Chauncey made it possible to pull the curtain back to show that what appeared to be legitimate business” could be a front for organized crime,” Aguirre said. “Holt was very actively involved in monitoring, and to some degree participating in, what was taking place in this crossover between hard-core organized crime and infiltration of legitimate businesses by organized crime.”
Aguirre added that Holt “was a source for the FBI, but I can’t go into that any further than just to say that.”
Even now, it’s difficult to say with certainty that Chauncey Marvin Holt was the real deal. There is no doubt he was involved with organized crime and that he had a relationship with U.S. intelligence agencies. But how far can one go in buying his story about Oswald being set up?
Holt is in the truest sense an enigma, his life shrouded in periods of mystery. So it’s not surprising that what he did know and did share was often limited by the world he lived in, limited to a “need to know basis.”
