2.

For Jim Braden, whose true identity is Eugene Hale Brading, is a man with singularly awesome direct ties to the highest levels of the Mafia. Of all the Mafia figures connected to the syndicate's crucial security and enforcement activities of coercion, maiming, intra-syndicate assassination and outside murder contracting, Jim Braden appears to be an indispensable link - or leader - of organized crime's far flung network of "controlled violence" specialists and professional hit men.

Braden's involvement with the Mafia's highest echelon "enforcers" has spanned the continent from coast to coast and covers virtually every national crime syndicate jurisdiction. According to federal authorities working with the Justice Department's organized crime strike force units, and according to other high government sources cited by author Royer Lansky, Jim Braden is now serving as personal courier for Meyer Lansky.

The importance of this mysterious man who was picked up under a false name across the street from the Texas Book Depository just moments after the shots were fired on November 22, 1963 cannot be overemphasized.

Though there were several innocent witnesses or bystanders in the area of the assassination who were also arrested or brought in for questioning by the Dallas police, all of whom were shortly released like Jim Braden, his presence there at that precise moment does in fact raise an incredible specter, and may indeed have been the monumental slip-up that critics of the Warren Commission now attest to.

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