Gus Russo was born in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1950. As a student Russo was opposed to the Vietnam War and worked for Robert Kennedy during the 1968 presidential campaign. He also began taking an interest in the assassination of John F. Kennedy and eventually produced a screenplay that was later turned down by Oliver Stone.
In 1991 Russo was recruited as a researcher on a Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) documentary on the life of Lee Harvey Oswald. According to Russo: "With a huge research budget, we divided into four teams. All of us were given great latitude. I was allowed to follow up on every lead (conspiratorial and otherwise) I had always wanted to test. We went everywhere Oswald went, from Minsk, Russia to Atsugi, Japan. I crisscrossed the U.S. for eighteen months." Who Was Lee Harvey Oswald? was finally shown on television in 1993.
Dan Rather chose Russo to represent the critics of the Warren Report in his 1993 television special, Who Shot JFK? Russo was also employed as an investigative reporter for ABC News and worked with Peter Jennings on the television production of Dangerous World, The Kennedy Years.
In 1998 Russo published Live By The Sword: The Secret War against Castro and the Death of JFK. In the book Russo argues that Lee Harvey Oswald was probably a lone gunman and that the secret war against Fidel Castro "precipitated both President Kennedy's assassination and its cover-up." Russo suggests that Oswald was the lone gunman and that Lyndon B. Johnson, the Central Intelligence Agency and Robert Kennedy took part in the cover-up in order to prevent a nuclear war against Cuba and the Soviet Union.
The book was well received by the anti-conspiracy media and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. The leading supporter of the lone-gunman theory, Gerald Posner, wrote: "Russo's Live by the Sword unequivocally places the guilt on Lee Harvey Oswald. He convincingly demonstrates that the cover up that followed the assassination was prompted in part by the fear of top government officials, including Bobby Kennedy, that Castro, or the climate fostered by his regime, might have played a role in the murder and that the United States' own plots to kill Castro would be exposed."
James P. Hosty was also impressed with the book and wrote: "The reason most people have not accepted the conclusions of the Warren Report is its failure to ascribe a motive to Oswald. Live By the Sword finally discloses the most likely motivation for Oswald as well as the reason that motive had to be kept secret."
Other books by Russo include The Outfit (2002), the story of the "secretive organised crime cartel that began its reign in prohibition-era Chicago before becoming the puppet master of Hollywood, Las Vegas and Washington". Russo also co-wrote Gangsters and Goodfellas (2004) with Henry Hill. Russo's latest book is Supermob (2005).
Courtesy of Spartacus Educational.