8 Chapter 4: Louis M. Bloomfield, the Assassination Engineer

Chapter 4: Louis M. Bloomfield, the Assassination Engineer
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Left to Right: Louis Bloomfield, Bernard Bloomfield (brother), David Ben-Gurion. This picture was taken in Israel on May 4th, 1949 when the Bloomfield brothers met Israeli Prime Minister Ben-Gurion at a garden party celebrating Israel’s first birthday. (Photo from Israel Diary, by Bernard Bloomfield, 1950)

(To view the Bloomfield Photogallery, click here.)

BackgroundOverwhelming evidence indicates that the man who engineered and organized the assassination of President Kennedy was Louis Mortimer Bloomfield, of Montreal, Canada. Bloomfield was an extraordinary individual in the sense that he operated behind the scenes influencing the highest echelons of power within many countries. He was a prominent Jewish philanthropist in Canada and Israel,¹ a well connected international lawyer,² a spy,³ a soldier,⁴ and a diplomat,⁵ all rolled into one human being. A declassified document from the State Department described Bloomfield as "intense, more inclined to talk than to listen, but polite—almost courtly."⁶
I do not know if Bloomfield is still alive; however, he would be somewhere between ninety-three and ninety-seven years old as of this writing (2002). He was about sixty years old when President Kennedy was killed in 1963.
Little is known about Bloomfield’s personal life, although the previously mentioned declassified document from the State Department revealed that he was "married to the daughter of Rabbi Sterne,"⁷ and that his "wife is approximately twenty years his junior."⁸

Profile of Bloomfield Written by Brother BernardA revealing profile of Bloomfield was presented in the forward the 1950 book, Israel Diary, written by his brother Bernard Bloomfield. Here is that forward in its entirety:

In 1902 my late father, Harry Bloomfield, and his brothers made a pilgrimage from Canada to Palestine. As small boys my brother and I never tired of hearing his stories of the Holy Land, and when he died of influenza during the epidemic in 1918, we resolved, young as we were, to keep alive his devotion to the ancient homeland of the Jews.The years that followed were exciting ones. The [British] Mandate; the gradual dismemberment of the National Home to a quarter of its original area; the riots; the various Commissions culminating in the U.N.S.C.O.P.; partition; the American volt face; the Declaration of the State of Israel; the Arab invasions; bloody battles and ultimate victory.
The sacrifices of the Jews in Israel, the stirring and excitementaccompanying the birth of the New State, the first painful stages of its growth, created in us a strong desire to see this phenomenon on the spot.
On March 12, 1949, in a blinding snowstorm that delayed our departure several hours while the runaways were being cleared, we took off from Montreal’s Dorval Airport. Our journey to Israel was circuitous. My brother is an international lawyer and had certain matters to attend to en route. So we traveled via London, Gibraltar, Tangier, Madrid, Rome, Athens and Nicosia. On March 28 our plane landed at Haifa. We traveled extensively throughout Israel from Dan to Beersheba, and, through the courtesy of the Israeli Army, across the Southern Negev Desert over the Scorpion’s Ladder with the first convoy of newspapermen and photographers to reach the Gulf of Aqaba since the war’s end.
I am a businessman and had never written for publication. My wife is an ardent Zionist (her grandmother was a delegate to the Second Congress at Basle in 1898), and wanting her to share my soul-stirring experiences in Israel, I wrote to her at length as I saw, heard, and thought. These letters, together with detailed notes I kept of our travels, form the basis of this diary. Its transformation into a book is due, in great measure, to the painstaking help and encouragement of my friend Abe Goldberg and my brother Louis.On the barren, eroded slopes of Neve Ilan, a French Maquis kibbutz in the Jerusalem Corridor, Louis and I planted, one bright spring morning, the Bloomfield Memorial Forest, in honor of the man who taught us to be loyal Canadians and good Jews. We planted it in territory allotted to the Arabs under the Partition Plan, but won by the Jews after bitter fighting and many casualties. We did it as a symbol that this ground, stained by the blood of our heroes, must ever remain in Jewish hands.

(B. Bloomfield, Israel Diary, pp. ix & x)

Bloomfield, the Jewish PhilanthropistAs a Jewish philanthropist, Louis Bloomfield worked extensively with his brother, Bernard. They built the Bloomfield Stadium⁹ in Tel Aviv which hosts Israeli and international soccer games even today. They also built the Sir Mortimer B. Davis Jewish General Hospital¹⁰ in Montreal. I suspect that Sir Mortimer B. Davis was an uncle or other close relative of the Bloomfield brothers. It is worth noting that Bloomfield’s mother’s maiden name was Sadie Davis.¹¹ Obviously, Bernard and Louis Bloomfield admired Davis a great deal since they named a hospital after him. In addition, Louis’ parents, Harry and Sadie, may have given Louis the same middle name, Mortimer, as Sir Davis.
Sir Mortimer Barnett Davis was a whisky supplier to Sam Bronfman during prohibition.¹² Davis also made a fortune in the tobacco business.¹³ He owned the Canadian Industrial Alcohol Company and operated Corby and Wiser distilleries.¹⁴ If Louis Bloomfield was in fact the nephew of Sir Mortimer Davis—the bootlegger and business associate of Sam Bronfman from the prohibition period, this would indeed explain Bloomfield’s extraordinary influence and power.
In 1971, Louis and Bernard Bloomfield built a student union building, named the Bloomfield Center, at Saint Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Canada.¹⁵In addition, Louis and Bernard Bloomfield were principals in Israel’s labor union, Histadrut.¹⁶ In 1967, Louis Bloomfield was given a Histadrut award for "outstanding work in aid of pioneering Israel."¹⁷ Previous recipients of the Histadrut award included Sam Bronfman, Arthur Goldberg, Harry Truman, and Eleanor Roosevelt.¹⁸

Criticism of Histadrut by an Israeli IntellectualIn my research, I found an article by a highly qualified and disinterested source, Dr. Steven Plout, a senior lecturer in economics and business at the University of Haifa. In his article, Plout asserted that Histadrut is nothing more than organized crime in Israel. Plout wrote the following:

The main body of organized crime in Israel is an institution called the Histadrut. It is often thought that the Histadrut is the Israeli version of the AFL-CIO in the US or the TUC in the UK, but it is in many ways more closely related to the Corleone crime family.. . .The fact is that the Labor Party is behaving like those sandbox brats who say that if they cannot own the toy they will bust it, and if they cannot be in power in Israel, they will maximize the damage to the country by Histadrut syndicalism and Bolshevism.

(Steven Plout, The Histadrut Crime Family (article), December 31, 1996)

Bernard Bloomfield’s ObituaryAround September of 1984, Louis Bloomfield’s brother Bernard died of kidney disease at the age of 79. His obituary—which appeared in the Globe and Mail, a Toronto newspaper—reveals the magnitude of power and influence that the Bloomfield brothers wielded internationally. Here is the full obituary:

JEWISH PHILANTHROPIST—A prominent member of Montreal’s Jewish community, who was president and director of the Canadian Manufacturers Sales Co. Ltd. And the Israel Continental Oil Co. has died.Bernard Manfred Bloomfield died Thursday in the hospital of complications resulting from a kidney ailment. He was 79.
He led a Canadian trade mission to Israel in 1962 and was a delegate to the prime minister’s economic conference in Israel in 1968. He served with the Eldee Foundation, the Jewish National Fund of Canada, the Canada-Israel Chamber of Commerce in Israel, the United Israel Appeal, the Jewish People’s Schools and the State of Israel Bonds Association.
Mr. Bloomfield was born in Montreal and graduated from McGill University with a bachelor of commerce degree in 1927.
In 1943, he married Neri Judith Loewy and they had two children, a son Harry, a Montreal lawyer, and a daughter, Evelyn.Mr. Bloomfield received numerous honorary degrees, the Queen Elizabeth Medal and was made Grand Commander of the Star of Africa. The Queen honored him with the Order of the Knight of Justice and the Most Venerable Order of the Hospital of St. John of Jerusalem.

(The Globe and Mail, newspaper, Toronto, Ontario; September 1, 1984)

Bloomfield, the International Lawyer and AuthorAs a lawyer, Louis Bloomfield was an expert on international boundary disputes.¹⁹ In 1968, he was urged by the US State Department to go to Belize to learn about the situation there.²⁰ At that time, Belize was struggling for independence from Great Britain.²¹ In 1970, Bloomfield was an unpaid advisor to the opposition party in British Honduras. He authored at least three books on international law: The British Hondurus Guatemala Dispute (1953), Egypt, Israel and the Gulf of Aqaba (1957), andCrimes Against Internationally Protected Persons (1975). The latter book was co-authored with Gerald F. FitzGerald. In addition, Bloomfield was a member of the committee that drafted the Helsinki Rules of the Uses of the Waters of International Rivers (1966).²²

Bloomfield’s Work at Phillips and Vineberg, a Montreal Law FirmBloomfield worked for years at the law firm of Phillips and Vineberg in Montreal.²³ The firm’s founder, Lazarus Phillips, was a personal friend of Sam Bronfman.²⁴ Phillips and Vineberg handled most of Bronfman’s legal and financial affairs.²⁵ In 1968 Phillips was appointed to the Canadian Senate,²⁶ a position that Bronfman had sought but never gained. The political ambitions of Phillips had created a rift between the two men years earlier, but Phillips and Vineberg continued handling Bronfman’s affairs anyway; however, most of the work was done by Phillips’ partner and nephew, Philip Vineberg.²⁷ Today Phillips’ law firm—now Goodman, Phillips, Vineberg—is one of the most prestigious international law firms in Canada.
It is significant that Phillips and Vineberg opened a law firm in Paris in 1961.²⁸ This is important because it gave Bloomfield a legal presence near Marseilles, France, the heart of worldwide heroin production by the French Corsican underworld. Marseilles was also the city where professional assassins were recruited to kill Kennedy.

Bloomfield, the Haganah Soldier Trained by General WingateAs a spy and soldier, Bloomfield was first and foremost a Jew, a Zionist, and one of the principal founders of the modern Jewish state of Israel. On May 4th, 1949, he and his brother Bernard, met Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion at a garden party, hosted by Ben-Gurion, in celebration of Israel’s first birthday.²⁹
At the age of about thirty-three, Bloomfield sought to help fulfill his father’s dream of establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine.³⁰ He joined the British military and served in Palestine as an Intelligence Officer under General Charles Orde Wingate.³¹ Bloomfield and Wingate trained the Jewish army, Haganah, from 1936 through 1939, during the Arab Revolt.³² The British—who controlled Palestine at that time and had supported the Zionist movement under the British Mandate—were caught off-guard by massive Arab resistance. The British responded by sending more than 20,000 troops into Palestine.³³ Bloomfield was one of those soldiers.
To counter the onslaught of Arab attacks, General Wingate and Bloomfield trained Special Night Squads, comprised primarily of Haganah fighters, the illegal Jewish army.³⁴Their tactics were based on the strategic principles of surprise, mobility, and night attacks, and they served effectively both as defensive and offensive units, successfully pre-empting and resisting Arab attacks.³⁵ By 1939 Wingate, Bloomfield and fellow Zionists had armed more than 15,000 Jews to defend the Zionist nationalist movement in Palestine.³⁶ Wingate was killed in an airplane crash in Burma in 1944, and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.³⁷ When the O.S.S. was formed in the early 1940s, Bloomfield was recruited and given the rank of major.³⁸

More EspionageIn 1947, the O.S.S. evolved into the CIA, and Bloomfield continued doing contract work for them as well as the State Department/CIA through 1970.³⁹
There is circumstantial evidence suggesting that Bloomfield and Clay Shaw (using the aliases of Colonel René Bertrand and Colonel Beaument in the French spy agency, SDECE) solicited Antoine Guerini—leader of the Guerini Family, the top French-Corsican Mafia at Marseilles, France—to hire hit men to assassinate President Kennedy.⁴⁰The Guerini Family had extensive ties to the CIA since the late 1940s.⁴¹ The men Antoine Guerini selected later became the lieutenants for Auguste Ricord. Their names were Lucien Sarti, François Chiappe, and Jean-Paul Angeletti. Guerini asked a fourth man to participate as well, but he refused. His name was Christian David. Like the other three assassins, David later became one of Auguste Ricord’s top lieutenants.⁴² The relationships between Sarti, Chiappe, Angeletti, David, and Ricord were documented by Evert Clark and Nicholas Horrock in their 1973 book, Contrabandista.
Using the Paris law office of Phillips and Vineberg as a front,⁴³ Bloomfield was able to manage the legal affairs of the French-Corsican underworld figures and to set up European bank accounts—via Permindex—to launder illicit heroin profits.

(To view the Bloomfield Photogallery, click here.)

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Endnotes

The following Canadian newspaper clippings, supplied by the Bloomfield Center at St. Francis Xavier Antigosh, Nova Scotia, corroborate the philanthropic endeavors of the Bloomfield brothers:

University Centre Named for Bloomfield Family (Sept.1971), Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Vol. 9, No. 2

Bloomfield Centre to official open Nov. 7 (Sept. 1971 assumed), paper unknown

Bloomfield Centre to Open Soon (Sept. 21, 1971), Sydney Cape Breton Post, Nova Scotia

The following newspaper article further and accompanying profile corroborates it: Histadrut Award: Bloomfield to be Honored (1967), Montreal Newspaper article, declassified document (Sept. 1, 1982), FOI Case No. 8201020, United States Department of State

ibid

[Bloomfield] Multiple sources listed below:

Jim Garrison, On the Trail of the Assassins, pp 100-103

Bernard Bloomfield, Israel Diary (1950), pp 5 - 7, description of Louis Bloomfield’s visit with Lorna Wingate, widow of General Charles Orde Wingate, and five-year-old son, Orde.

General Charles Orde Wingate (brief biography), The Pedagogic Center, The Department for Jewish Zionist Education, The Jewish Agency for Israel (NOTE: Given Bloomfield’s friendship with Wingate’s widow in 1950, and Bloomfield’s service with British Intelligence in the late 1930s, one can surmise that Bloomfield assisted Wingate in the training of Haganah soldiers during the Arab Revolt (1936 - 1939).

Jim Marrs, Crossfire: The Plot That Killed Kennedy (1989), p 499. Author cites 1981 special report by investigative reporters David Goldman and Jeffrey Steinberg stating that Bloomfield was "recruited into the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in 1938, during the war was given rank within the US Army, and eventually became part of the OSS intelligence system, including the FBI’s Division Five. Reportedly, Bloomfield became quite close with J. Edgar Hoover."

Bernard Bloomfield, Israel Diary (1950), p 5. The author, Louis Bloomfield’s brother, wrote that Louis had been a major in the Army Service Corps. Bernard wrote: "We had dinner at the hotel and then went to a night club. There Amos [brother-in-law*] met a soldier whom he hadn’t seen for twelve years. They were at that time involved in the same arms smuggling plot, back in 1936, for which Amos was sent to jail. They had quite a reunion. He was a fine big fellow, a major, married, with children. When he learned Louis was a major in the Army Service Corps, in which he also had served, he became more communicative and told Louis and Amos that he was fed up with life—all his friends having been killed or wounded. He couldn’t get out of the army because he was such a good soldier; they wouldn’t release him. He said he received 38 [Israeli pounds] per month as pay, and it cost him 75 [Israeli pounds] to live. He made a very good impression on us—a decent and serious fellow."

Encyclopedia Britannica: Arab Revolt (1936 - 1939)

ibid

Histadrut Award: Bloomfield to be Honored (1967), Montreal Newspaper article, declassified document (Sept. 1, 1982), FOI Case No. 8201020, United States Department of State. An anonymous person who apparently worked for the State Department or CIA wrote a rough profile of Bloomfield that accompanies the newpaper clipping. The not states the following: "9-23-70: You’ll find Louis Bloomfield to be intense, more inclined to talk than to listen, but polite – almost courtly. He’s an expert on international boundary disputes – having written several books on specific disputes – see clippings. He and his brother Bernard (recently named Hon. Con Gen of So. Korea) are philanthropists – built stadium in Tel Aviv which bears their name and research center for Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. Married to daughter of Rabbi Sterne. (Wife is approximately 20 years his junior) Is unpaid advisor to opposition party in British Honduras. Went to Belize 1968 at my urging to learn more about actual situation there."

ibid

ibid

ibid

Histadrut Award: Bloomfield to be Honored (1967), Montreal Newspaper article, declassified document (Sept. 1, 1982), FOI Case No. 8201020, United States Department of State. Profile on Bloomfield brothers mentions that they "built [a] stadium in Tel Aviv."

Histadrut Award: Bloomfield to be Honored (1967), Montreal Newspaper article, declassified document (Sept. 1, 1982), FOI Case No. 8201020, United States Department of State. Profile on Bloomfield brothers mentions that they "built stadium in Tel Aviv which bears their name and research center for Jewish General Hospital in Montreal." The Google search engine indicates that the stated hospital is actually the Sir Mortimer B. Davis Jewish General Hospital.

Biography of Bernard Bloomfield on Internet stated that his mother’s name was Sadie Davis. Reference http://www.stfx.ca/campus/service/art-gallery/pieces/28.html

Michael Marrus, Sam Bronfman: The Life and Times of Seagram’s Mr. Sam (1991), p. 112

ibid

ibid

The following Canadian newspaper clippings were supplied by the Bloomfield Center at St. Francis Xavier Antigosh, Nova Scotia:

University Centre Named for Bloomfield Family (Sept.1971), Antigonish, Nova Scotia, Vol. 9, No. 2

Bloomfield Centre to official open Nov. 7 (Sept. 1971 assumed), paper unknown

Bloomfield Centre to Open Soon (Sept. 21, 1971), Sydney Cape Breton Post, Nova Scotia

The following references corroborate Bloomfield’s involvement with Histadrut:

Histadrut Award: Bloomfield to be Honored (1967), Montreal Newspaper article, declassified document (Sept. 1, 1982), FOI Case No. 8201020, United States Department of State

Bernard Bloomfield, Israel Diary (1950), pp. 24, 32, 34, 41, 42