For decades, Key West author and historian David L. Sloan has been known for unearthing the island’s strange mysteries, from the truth behind Robert the Doll to the real inventor of Key Lime Pie. His newest discovery has pushed him far beyond haunted dolls and lost recipes into Cold War espionage, organized crime and a Key West baker suspected of assassinating the president of the United States.
Sloan’s new book, “How Key West Killed JFK,” lays out the case in detail, connecting Molina’s Bakery employee Gilberto Policarpo Lopez to guns, violence, Fidel Castro, the Tampa Mafia and a timeline that aligns precisely with President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
“It still sounds crazy,” Sloan said. “But the documents, the first-hand accounts, the family – it’s all there. I only followed the trail.”
Sloan grew up in Dallas, less than 15 miles from where JFK was shot. As a kid, he bought comic books from the Sun Rexall Drug Store in Richardson, where Marina Oswald had worked, but Sloan’s investigation didn’t start in Dallas. It began here in Key West.
“Bum Farto’s story always fascinated me,” he said, referring to Key West’s legendary fire chief, who went missing in 1976 under mysterious circumstances. “In 2013, Mark Anthony Terrill sent me the FBI files on Bum’s disappearance, which he obtained through a FOIA request, and it started me on this adventure.”
Sloan teamed up with filmmaker Quincy Perkins, and the two followed Farto’s trail out of the country, eventually uncovering what really happened. But what shocked Sloan most wasn’t Bum’s fate, but what was inside those same declassified FBI and CIA files.
Reports include detailed accounts of Jack Ruby running guns through Islamorada, Lee Harvey Oswald fueling his boat at Toppino’s dock on Stock Island, and Oswald and Ruby being together at the Key West Airport. Former Key West mayor Kermit Lewin even claimed Oswald stayed at his hotel.
“The deeper I dug, the more I realized nearly every major player in the assassination of our president has a direct connection to Key West, including JFK himself,” Sloan said.
His book charts the hidden history, revealing how Key West transformed from a cigar city and fishing town into a gangster’s paradise, with numbers runners, drug traffickers and outside forces like Jimmy Hoffa attempting to seize control of local businesses as he bought and developed nearly half the island.
Layered on top of that were the geopolitical tensions of the early 1960s, with Kennedy, the CIA, Fidel Castro, the Soviet Union, Cuban exiles and organized crime engaged in a secret war that positioned Key West at the crossroads of global power.
The most explosive revelations in Sloan’s book center on Gilberto Policarpo Lopez, a Cuban baker long suspected by researchers of being a second shooter based on declassified files and eerie parallels to Lee Harvey Oswald.
Lopez traveled from Tampa to Texas shortly before the assassination, crossed into Mexico just after Kennedy was shot, boarded a plane to Cuba and then disappeared.
Sloan planned a trip to Cuba, hoping to find the accused assassin alive.
As a first step, he reached out to his friend, cold-case researcher Cheryl Sanchez-Simmons. She connected Sloan with Cookie Machin, the brother of Lopez’s wife at the time of the assassination, Blanche Leon. Machin revealed arguments about Dallas, a duffel bag full of guns and Lopez’s political leanings with details never recorded in government files.
Then Sanchez-Simmons made the discovery that changed everything: Lopez did not stay in Cuba. Though he died in 2021, he had returned to the United States in 1995 and lived openly in Hialeah, somehow avoiding journalists, law enforcement and federal agencies for 26 years.
“The implications of this are unbelievable,” Sloan said.
Sloan located Lopez’s daughter, Lisbette, and over a month of conversations, she filled in the missing decades of her father’s life. Her stories, combined with Machin’s family testimony and the declassified files, provided new evidence that may finally prove a conspiracy.
“Between Cookie Machin and Lisbette, we now know Lopez was in Dallas when the president was assassinated,” Sloan said. “We know about his guns, his violence and his ideology.”
Before Sloan’s work, the only known photo of Lopez showed him wearing sunglasses with most of his face obscured. “How Key West Killed JFK” publishes clear photographs of him for the first time.
“I don’t consider myself a JFK researcher. I know Key West. That’s my field of expertise. And I feel like the island delivered these new revelations to the surface because it’s time,” said Sloan.
“I suspect there are researchers out there who have been investigating JFK far longer than I have, who, when they read this new information, or see the face of Gilberto Lopez for the first time, they might make the connection that solves the crime of the century.”More information is at PhantomPress.com.
