Tony: The following is for your information only and may not be posted by me. The information may be used but do not attribute to me. A magazine may publish the query itself as a brief article next spring and I am under contract. No big deal - not Vanity Fair - but an interesting snippet if it is published. Query: Does Si Newhouse, Jr. have culpable knowledge of the Kennedy Assassination? No kidding, the question's for real. For more than thirty years Newhouse and his media empire have played a unique role in the controversy surrounding the assassination of JFK. Why? Si Newhouse, Sr. founded Advance Communications which today is one the nations leading communications conglomerates. Si Newhouse, Jr. was a high school classmate lawyer/fixer Roy Cohn. Cohn's connections to the Newhouse empire run deep. In Newhouse, a biography published this month, author Donald Maier notes how in 1954, Si Junior set Cohn up with a distributing company in which Si Senior was an investor. That company was American News (later AnCorp) and its principal was Harry Garfinkle. Garfinkle was noted for his tough tactics and his ties to organized crime, particularly the Bonano family. One of his associates, Irwin Molasky moved to Las Vegas and became a central figure in the Dalitz-Lansky group. Molasky and Si Junior were active in the Cohn deals that led to Cohn's first indictment in the United Dye case. In 1958, Cohn put Newhouse into the Sunrise Hospital deal as a partner of Moe Dalitz and other media personalities on his pad. Hoffa's Teamsters supplied the funding and the deal was negotiated at the Nacional, Meyer Lansky's casino in Havana. Cohn was directly linked with the JFK assassination in 1967 in Farewell America by James Hepburn and then again in 1970, in a monograph by William Torbitt. Not one whisper of these allega tions has ever been aired by the mainstream media. Maybe that's because James Hepburn and William Torbitt are both pseudonyms and each of their works have been published and circulated under questionable circumstances. Yet, aside from their allegations of Cohn's role in the assassi nation, both documents accurately describe Cohn relationships that have never been thoroughly analyzed in the light of the events at Dealey Plaza. Those same relationships are at the heart of the Newhouse-Cohn friendship. For example, the Torbitt docu ment emphasizes Cohn's relationship to the Bonano crime family and the Moe Dalitz group in Las Vegas. In Dan Moldea's Hoffa Wars the same Bonano-Dalitz axis emerges as a feature of Jimmy Hoffa's connection to organized crime. Jack Ruby was connected to the same axis. Si Junior was an ever ready source of influence, power and cash for Cohn. In Mobbed-Up, author James Neff details how Cohn used his in fluence with Newhouse to get the Cleveland Plain Dealer to re tract a damaging story about Teamster boss, Jackie Presser. The intermediary between Cohn and Presser was Genovese crime family leader Anthony Fat Tony Salerno. In the years since the assassination, Newhouse has played a unique role in stifling inquiries into the assassinations of Jack and Bobby Kennedy. Arguably, Newhouse was an unwittingly partic ipant in the JFK coverup even before the assassination. In Sep tember 1963, the New Orleans Times Picayune, a Newhouse paper, featured a report that Castro had threatened to retaliate for attempts on his life. Gerald Posner suggests in Case Close that Lee Harvey Oswald's reading that story may have prompted him to assassinate Kennedy. The paperback edition of Turner and Christian's The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, relates a more blatant example of Newhouse participation in an assassination coverup. In their book, the authors marshal convincing evidence of conspiracy in the assassi nation of Robert Kennedy. Their publisher was Random House and prior to publication the book was thoroughly vetted for libel. However, in the midst of publication, Random House was acquired by Newhouse Communications and the new owners took aggressive action to suppress publication of their own book. Last year, another chapter in the Newhouse maintenance of the JFK coverup may have been the publication of Case Closed itself. In 1991, writer Mark North footnoted Cohn's United Dye involvement and friendship with Newhouse in Act of Treason which charged complicity by J. Edgar Hoover in the assassination. Shortly after publication of Act of Treason, Newhouse subsidiary Random House contracted with Posner for Case Closed. The support that Random House gave Case Closed was truly extraordinary and suggests a darker process at work. Given Posner's reliance on confidential intelligence sources and Random House's recent records, some have suggested that Case Closed is typical CIA sponsored book. This November, Random House is publishing a new book by Norman Mailer in which he will reportedly retract his oft stated belief that a conspiracy killed JFK and belatedly support the Warren Report. According to Maier, the man who initially introduced Mailer to Newhouse and Random House was ... Roy Cohn. What has driven the Newhouse empire's single-minded devotion to the JFK cover-up? Given his relationship to Cohn, the questions ought to be asked: what does Si Newhouse know, and when did he learn it?