THE LINKS BETWEEN THE JFK ASSASSINATION
AND THE LUCIEN RIVARD AFFAIR

Mexico City, October 1963

In Summer 1963, Michel Caron is only a small criminal having to his credit only some minor burglaries. Father of four children, Caron needs money. Being in touch with Lucien Rivard, he quickly accepts to run errands without asking questions. On September 26, 1963, Rivard, who needed an anonymous courier for an important operation, decided to send Caron and his wife to Mexico City, to bring back a packet...

Caron leaves immediately and enters Mexico on September 31. On October 2, like a simple tourist, he arrives in Mexico City, just as another visitor, Lee Harvey Oswald, is also in the city on a blindfold mission. Oswald leaves Mexico City on October 3. Caron, who has confided his car to some unknown peoples who have the task to hide something in it, innocently visited the city until October 9.

On October 10 1963, at the Mexico-United States border, the U.S. Customs officers search Caron's car and, by luck, discover 35 kilograms of heroine. At a market price of one million dollars a kilogram, this 35 millions seizure is the second most important of U.S. history. Submitted to a persuasive interrogatory, and confident that he, his wife and his four children will be protected, Caron starts to confess. First, Caron denounces his Quebec's accomplices and, finally, their chief, the recipient of the merchandise, Lucien Rivard himself.

Though he doesn't know their complete names, he finally identifies on photographs the Mexico City's suppliers. Thus he incriminates the Corsican Paul Mondolini, partner of Santos Trafficante and Michel-Victor Mertz, and considered as Mexico City heroin's king; Jorge Edouardo Moreno Chauvet, Mexico most important narcotics trafficker; Fulgentio Cruz Bonet, a Cuban exile; and Mafiosis Tony Farina and Frank Giovani Scalici, members of Carlo Gambino's New York's family, the most powerful chief of the U.S. Cosa Nostra.

Even if they didn't understand all the implications of this huge transaction involving such important international Mafia's characters, observers of the Rivard Case noticed that, on view of this file's importance, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy did show personal interest to the case. Maybe his interest was motivated by his knowledge of the network to which participated Rivard.

So, the Rivard Case reveals the existence of an important heroin transaction, taking source in Mexico just at the moment when, according to Christian David, three Corsican killers where in Mexico City, in transit toward Dallas. Christian David was the French heroin trafficker that revealed to reporter Steve Rivele that a contract to kill John F. Kennedy was offered to him in Marseille. According to David’s story, he declined any participation in the contract but three Corsican shooters took a part in the assassination and where paid with heroin. In the BBC television series The Men Who Killed Kennedy, Rivele stated that he believe Paul Mondolini was the coordinator of the Corsican shooters.

Interestingly enough, the same Paul Mondolini was the source of the heroin that Lucien Rivard tried to import to the United States.

The ties linking Rivard to the Trafficante-Ruby network and the Mertz-Mondolini French connection, as well as the synchronism between Oswald's trip, the presence of Corsican assassins in Mexico City and the Rivard Case, had never been exposed anywhere, neither even suggested otherwise that by an obscur allusion to Lucien Rivard in The Plot to Kill the President, a book written by Robert G. Blakey, Chief Counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassination.