John Lennon and the Nitze men
How John Lennon found himself living above the son of a founding father of the CIA
My 2022 interview with New York based artist Robert Morgan about his observations around John Lennon’s assassination, appeared to me back then to be a complete waste of my time. None of what Morgan alleged he saw on December 8th, 1980 made any sense. But Morgan then inadvertently started to tell me some other interesting and up to now unknown facts, about the Dakota and the people surrounding John Lennon.
Morgan firstly told me that he vaguely knew Yoko Ono back in the day. He was dismayed when he tried to sell her his painting of police officers carrying John’s body out of the Dakota and she declined to purchase. Morgan was also angry at John Lennon for introducing young people to dangerous drugs such as LSD in the 1960’s and this seemed to have affected four of Morgan’s wife’s daughters (Morgan’s step-daughters). Morgan opined that his daughters were alive but they had a lot of ‘holes in their head’, from their past drug use. Drug use, that in Morgan’s view, was endorsed and promoted by John Lennon. Morgan admitted that many young people saw Lennon as a rock star who was akin to a hero. Morgan said he and his wife simply saw Lennon as an ‘enemy’.
But then Morgan revealed something incredible. He said that his wife’s cousin was the chairman of the board of the Dakota residence association. This man was called Peter Nitze and Nitze lived on the sixth floor. He was just one floor below John and Yoko, who were mostly residing on the whole of the seventh floor. I say mostly, because after John and Yoko moved into the Dakota in 1973, they started buying up other apartments in the building. Not all their new neighbours were happy about this. One Dakota resident at the time was apparently nervous about the possibility that the newly arrived Lennon’s might appear nude in the Dakota courtyard.
By 1979, John and Yoko had a staggering FIVE holdings at the Dakota. One on the first floor, two on the seventh, one on the eighth and one on the ninth. In 1979, the New York Magazine reported that the Lennon’s were also looking to purchase an additional sixth Dakota holding on the second floor. Once purchased, the Lennon’s would have been able to sleep on five out of the nine Dakota floors.
Peter Nitze had grave concerns about the Lennon’s taking over the Dakota building, regaling Morgan and his wife with ‘stories’ about Lennon and revealing that he and some of the other Dakota tenants were ‘bothered’ about the ex-Beatle and his wife taking over their building. Was Nitze also unhappy with Lennon for influencing his cousin’s children into taking drugs. I would say almost certainly.
Peter Nitze had the kind of powerful position at the Dakota, where he could accept or decline new residents asking to live in the building. One of the residents..