WHAT REALLY HAPPENED TO BUDDY HOLLY?

In the fall of 2008 I got laid off from my job and wound up doing temp work digitizing old materials at libraries around Florida. I would come in at closing and stay all night scanning pages and organizing files. 

One night I had been about a week at the Tampa central library and was going through a pile of the old St. Pete Beach-Comber. This was one of those alternative type free weeklies. It was 3:00 am and I was in the boring-job-brain-dead-zone. Papers were in and out of the scanner in a blur. 

But when I got to March 1993 I stopped scanning and did what your never supposed to do, I started to read.

I had noticed the name Buddy Holly which was kind of weird because me and my room-mate had just been talking about him. He said that when Dylan was in high school he went to Buddy Holly's last concert and I said, well that's just the kind of story the old man liked to tell about himself. So who knew if it was really true? But anyway, we both agreed that Buddy Holly was way ahead of his time.

I never scanned another page that night and hardly did a thing since then but stay obsessed about what I sat there and read:

Local Man Says Mob Killed Buddy Holly

by the Beach-Comber's investigative reporter, 

Phillip Golding

Everyone knows the first great loss in Rock and Roll history was the 1959 death of Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and "The Big Bopper" when their small airplane crashed in a frozen Iowa cornfield.

  But what if it was not an accident? 

 Frederick (Fred) Newsome is a security consultant, who came to central Florida after retiring as Chief Inspector of the Las Vegas Police organized-crime unit. He has decided to come forward now with a story that seems utterly fantastic; he claims that a bomb was placed on the small plane that carried the legendary rocker, in a Mafia hit that had been ordered by the Hollywood recording industry.

 I recently spoke with Mr. Newsome at his home in the quiet suburb of Oldsmar. 

 He gives the impression of a careful, methodical thinker, and as he talked I was drawn inevitably to the conclusion that the truth about Buddy Holly's death had been concealed from the public, repeatedly and deliberately.

 "You wouldn't think so," Mr. Newsome began, "but the type of interrogation cops hate the most is when some perp decides to spill it all. 

 “He'll start out in the morning connecting a lot of dots in unsolved cases, and by dinner time he's takin' credit for killing Marilyn Monroe and Elvis.

 "So back in '78 we had this mob hit-man name of Tony Rizzo, who was getting all giddy after a long day, and he starts trying to tell us he did the hit on Buddy Holly!"

 Newsome says the interrogators started laughing and ridiculing the prisoner, who immediately got offended and refused to say another word.

 So the officers all called it a night, hoping to get better information in the morning. But when they arrived they were transferred to other cases and told that Tony Rizzo had been handed over to the FBI.

 "I wouldn't a thought nothin' of it except for two things: when I pulled into the lot that morning I recognized Sam Caputo leaving the commissioner's office. 

 "Caputo was a Reprise Records exec that we'd suspected of mob activity but could never pin down. Rumor was the commissioner owed him a lot of favors.

 "And second thing, I had a drinking buddy in the FBI mob detail. We always traded favors and tips, but this guy never heard a word'a Rizzo neither. He just plain fell off the map."

 In 1989 Fred Newsome left Las Vegas to go into the private sector, and he has quietly used his law enforcement connections to investigate what he concluded was a vast cover-up of the truth about the death of Buddy Holly.

   My first question, of course, was WHY? Why would anyone pay for a Mafia contract on this brilliant and talented young man?

 According to Newsome, Buddy Holly was hated and feared by  the recording industry establishment.

 At the height of his popularity, Holly moved to New York and started his own studio. It was only a matter of time before he started producing other young rockers.

 "Just think about it," he mused, "the big boys in Hollywood had those rock'n'rollers tied up in one big money making package. 

 "The whole idea of a musician writing and producing his own music had them shakin' in their boots." 

 All this made sense, but it sounded like a lot of speculation on some pretty thin evidence. But Fred Newsome is a professional, and evidence is his bread and butter. 

 When he decided he really had a case was when he located Detective-Lieutenant Carl Long of the Iowa State Patrol.

 Officer Long had been assigned to the investigation immediately after that terrible crash in the snowbound Iowa farmland, and one small detail had really bothered him.

 "He told me." said Newsome, "that there was confusion about who'd been around before the plane took off." 

 Apparently, some of the witnesses mentioned a man that'd gotten on, then right back off again. The local people thought he was with the tour and the tour people thought he was local.

 Long told Newsome that he reported this to his Captain and the next day he was pulled off the case. They said he was wasting time on a 'wild goose chase.'

 For years Officer Long obsessed about this, and looked into the case quietly on his own. 

 The most confusing fact that he uncovered was a visit to the governor's mansion by some executives from Capitol Records, which is odd because none of the three on that plane had ever worked with that label.

 But here's the real clincher -- Fred Newsome told me that when the now-retired Long faxed him the composite police sketch of the missing witness, his heart skipped a beat.

 "I'm tellin' ya, by God, it was Tony Rizzo!"

 (end of part 1) 

NEXT WEEK: I Interview Carl Long

My head was spinning. I set the paper down and I didn’t go back to scanning. I reached right into the drawer for the next weeks issue of the Beach-Comber.

It wasn’t there.

I panicked, throwing magazines and newspapers onto the floor but there were no more issues of the St. Pete Beach-Comber. 

Alright, I told myself calm down. I looked for copies of area newspapers from around that date. Right off I saw the front page of The St. Petersburg Times dated two days after that last issue of the Beach-Comber.

Fire at Offices of

St. Pete Beach-Comber

Arson Suspected in Destruction of Local Weekly

Oh shit, I thought I’ve just stepped into something big. I don't think theres anything quieter than a library at 3:00 am but it just got a lot quieter.

I went into the mens room and left the light off while I looked out the window and tried to think. That was fifteen years ago, I thought so calm down. Nobodys watching you and your not in any danger. If the Mafia knew that the library had a copy of that paper they would of already done something.

So I signed out of my project and spent the rest of the night pouring through copies of The St. Petersburg Times and Tampa Tribune following the last issue of the Beach-Comber. 

It was just what I was afraid of. Phillip Golding died with a bullet from his own gun in what the police called “an apparent suicide” on the day after the fire. There was no mention of his news files or any investigation. Three days after that Frederick Newsome "lost control of his car at high speed" flipped over a barrier into oncoming traffic and died instantly. When police went to his home they found that burglars had already been there. No arrests were ever made.

For the next few weeks when I wasn't working I was at home searching the net. Fortunately Iowa had most of their state records and libraries online. I found mention of State Trooper Carl Long but nothing was there about him and the Buddy Holly case or the questions he raised. When I searched newspapers in central Iowa for late March of 1993 here is what I found. The "elderly widower" Carl Long was killed by a hit-and-run driver while out on "his daily walk". The officer sent to his home discovered it had been burglarized. The story was in the papers for a few days but investigators said they couldnt find any connection between the two crimes.

So there it is. Was Buddy Holly murdered? Was there a deadly cover-up? My friends say I'm paranoid but this whole thing creeps me out. Maybe getting this online now will jog some memories before all the witnesses are dead.

-- J. J. Roberts June 4, 2009