Seller Guilty in Kennedy Forgery Case

A man was found guilty Friday of selling salacious but forged documents claiming President Kennedy paid hush money to keep secret an affair with Marilyn Monroe.

Lawrence X. Cusack III, who made a fortune selling hundreds of Kennedy-linked documents he claimed came from his father, was convicted on 13 mail and wire fraud charges.

Cusack, 48, of Fairfield, Conn., faces up to five years in prison on each of the 13 fraud counts, and a maximum $250,000 fine on each count when he is sentenced in July.

When Judge Denise Cote announced the guilty verdict on each charge, Cusack’s jaw dropped. He stared, eyes narrowed, at the jurors, then he shook his head repeatedly and dropped his face into his hands.

The case caused a furor in 1997 after Pulitzer Prize-winning author Seymour Hersh deleted material based on the documents from his book “The Dark Side of Camelot.”

Cusack produced letters that he said were written between his late father, who helped handle the Monroe estate, and the slain president. The documents appeared to prove rumors about Kennedy and Monroe, the Mafia and FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover.

According to the papers, Kennedy had set up a trust for Monroe’s mother to buy silence about the rumored affair between the president and the actress.

Prosecutors said Cusack swindled investors out of about $7 million from 1993 to 1997 by selling the phony documents, including letters bearing Kennedy’s forged signature.

But he made key mistakes, prosecutors said. One letter purportedly signed by Kennedy includes ZIP codes, which did not exist at the time the letter was dated. And the typeface used in many of the letters came from a typewriter that was not manufactured until the 1970s.

Cusack “told lie after lie after lie to make people believe the documents were real,” prosecutor Peter Neiman told the jury Wednesday.

Defense attorney Robert Katzberg told jurors that although a handwriting expert concluded the president’s script had been simulated or traced, it could not be proved his client did it. But the government said the evidence was “overwhelming” that Cusack was “the person responsible” for the forgery.

Among prosecutors’ evidence were taped conversations in which Cusack confessed to forgery to a dealer who had helped sell the papers.