18

“Black Is White, and White Is Black”

The curious phenomenon that became Jim Garrison’s assassination probe can only be comprehended by trying to understand the man who was single-handedly responsible for the investigation. At six feet seven inches, with a bass voice and sharp tongue, Jim Garrison was an impressive figure. Born Earling Carothers Garrison in 1921 in Iowa and reared in New Orleans by his divorced mother, he served in the National Guard during World War II. After his discharge in March 1946, he attended Tulane Law School, graduated in 1949, and then moved to Seattle and Tacoma, where he was an FBI agent for two years. Bored with the Bureau, he returned to New Orleans and in July 1951 asked to be placed again on active service with the National Guard. He was relieved from duty fifteen months later. Doctors at Brooke Army Hospital in Texas found he suffered from a “severe and disabling psychoneurosis.” According to the Army’s evaluation, Garrison’s neurosis “interfered with his social and professional adjustment to a marked degree. He is considered totally incapacitated from the standpoint of military duty and moderately incapacitated in civilian adaptability.” The recommendation was long-term psychotherapy.1*

After his release from the Guard in October 1952, he worked first for a private law firm and then became an assistant district attorney, a post he held until 1958.2 He impressed others at the New Orleans DA’s office with a quick wit and was even considered the sharpest of more than twenty lawyers. However, he also developed a reputation for making snap judgments and oversimplifying complex issues. And it soon became clear he had an ego that revealed a tendency toward arrogance.³ “Garrison also had a small streak of paranoia, thinking he was up against everyone else, no matter what the case was,” says Hubie Badeaux, former chief of the New Orleans police intelligence division. “And when he got into the Kennedy assassination, that trait came to the forefront.”⁴

In a town that loved colorful characters, Garrison fit right in. When he left the DA’s office in 1958, he again entered private practice. He legally changed his name to Jim and developed a flamboyant reputation for expensive suits and cigars and multihour, four-martini lunches at the city’s best restaurants. He unsuccessfully campaigned to be a judge of the criminal court during the 1959 election. Two years later he was one of four candidates running against the incumbent district attorney, Richard Dowling. Given virtually no chance of winning, he took the campaign’s first television debate by storm and gained enough momentum to win by 6,000 votes. In May 1962, Garrison and his staff were sworn into office. His conduct quickly became a preview of what would happen once he launched his JFK investigation four years later. He often brought sensational charges that garnered headlines, but he seldom prosecuted the cases, much less ever obtained a conviction.

The first warning signs that he might be willing to trample someone’s civil liberties in exchange for media ink came soon after he took office. He brought malfeasance indictments against the former district attorney and one of his senior assistants. It was front-page news. But the charges were dismissed for lack of evidence, and “for stating no criminal offense recognizable in law.”⁵ Garrison promised to appeal, but never did. Instead, he embarked on a cleanup of vice in the French Quarter, and while his work again resulted in no trials or convictions, he received national press attention for his nightly raiding parties. “The Bourbon Street cleanup was a sham,” says Milton Brener, an assistant district attorney responsible for narcotics and vice, who worked under Garrison. “Any clubs that closed up only did so because of harassment.”6

Garrison was soon fighting with the local criminal judges, who under New Orleans law had to approve some of the DA’s budget, but balked at his Bourbon Street publicity raids and lavish plans for redecorating his office. In what would become vintage Garrison, he complained, “There is a conspiracy among the judges to wreck my administration,” and he accused the judges of being compromised by “racketeer influences.”⁷ The justices were so infuriated that all eight issued a charge of criminal defamation against him, a misdemeanor. Garrison was brought to trial in January 1963, acted as his own lawyer, and was convicted and sentenced to pay a $1,000 fine. (In 1965, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed the conviction, holding the Louisiana defamation statute was an unconstitutional infringement of free speech.)

While the appeal was pending, he pursued what appeared to be a vendetta against the judiciary, forcing malfeasance indictments through the grand jury against a leading judge, Bernard Cocke. In two trials, in which Garrison tried the cases himself when his assistants refused, Cocke was acquitted. “I had felt that such almost childishly punitive measures and blatant abuse of the Grand Jury,” said Milton Brener, “would cause wide public condemnation. Again, I had overestimated the public and underestimated Garrison.”⁸

In 1963, he charged nine policemen with brutality, but quietly dropped the case within two weeks, after intense media interest. In 1964, he held a press conference and announced that members of the state parole board were accepting bribes in exchange for granting early paroles. Garrison personally represented the city at the judicial hearing, but his case was so weak that it ended with no indictments or arrests. Next, he turned his attention to the state legislature, saying, “I am convinced that public bribery occurred in passage of House Bill 894.… We know bribery occurred. We want to find out where.”⁹ He never pursued an investigation. The legislature unanimously censured him for his unsupported accusations.¹⁰

William Gurvich, who was later Garrison’s chief investigator on the Kennedy case, said, “He believes everyone reads the headlines concerning arrests and charges but few people read denials or correcting statements.”11 “He wouldn’t worry about whether the charges were true or not,” Milton Brener told the author. “The press just loved him. When he made public statements, his only concern was whether it was going to get him a headline. He liked being the hero.”¹²

“If Garrison’s repeated and dramatic assaults on high office produced little by way of results,” said Brener, “he nevertheless captivated the public with his daring. He was now [in 1965] unquestionably one of the most powerful political figures in the State …”¹³

1965 was an election year for both the mayor and the district attorney. Early that year, signs appeared around the city proclaiming VOTE FOR GARRISON but not listing the office, fueling speculation he might run for mayor. He had occasionally spoken of higher office, but instead he ran for reelection. His opponent, criminal judge Malcolm O’Hara, urged voters to reject a man whose “ugly force … compels him to destroy everyone who fails to bow to his will. It used to be called a Napoleonic complex.”¹⁴ Garrison won a solid 60 percent of the vote.

Although he had earlier attacked vice in the French Quarter, he now lobbied for a full pardon for a Bourbon Street stripper, Linda Brigette, who had been convicted for lewd dancing. Aaron Kohn, an ex-FBI agent who headed the Metropolitan Crime Commission, criticized Garrison since Brigette danced for a club connected to New Orleans mob boss Carlos Marcello. Shortly afterward, three New Orleans gangsters were arrested in a New York restaurant with some of the country’s leading mafia figures. The publicity put pressure on Garrison to take action against the local mob. He reluctantly convened a grand jury to investigate mafia influence in the city, although his position was clear when he announced that Marcello was a “respectable businessman” and that “there is no organized crime in this city.”¹⁵ Garrison’s grand jury was supposed to investigate mob influence in the bail bond, pinball, and liquor industries, as well as gambling and prostitution. It asked Marcello questions for just over ten minutes, and did not return an indictment.¹⁶

While Garrison was ostensibly building a reputation as a corruption fighter, there is evidence he was developing a special relationship with Carlos Marcello. During his earlier raids on Bourbon Street clubs he had assiduously avoided those dominated by the local godfather.17 The man he hired as his chief investigator, Pershing Gervais, had previously been fired from the police for stealing payoff money, and later admitted he was friendly with Marcello.¹⁸ “Gervais was as crooked as could be,” says Milton Brener.¹⁹ During his second term as DA, Garrison dismissed eighty-four cases against Marcello associates.²⁰*

“He [Garrison] spent more and more time at the Playboy Club and the New Orleans Athletic Club,” said crime commissioner Aaron Kohn, “and hardly ever went to the office.”²¹ But Garrison soon focused on a new probe that made the public lose sight of his laxity on the mafia. JFK’s murder was something that had been on his mind since his first term, but he now decided to pursue the case. The investigation, which began in secret shortly after the second term commenced, was initially based on two different leads.

The first involved David Ferrie, an eccentric self-styled adventurer, whom Garrison later called “one of the most important men in history.” On November 24, 1963, two days after the President was killed, Jack Martin, a private investigator, called an assistant district attorney in New Orleans with the startling information that Ferrie had been in Dallas about two weeks before, had been corresponding with Oswald, and had taught Oswald how to shoot.”22 Garrison’s investigators ransacked Ferrie’s apartment, picked him up several days later, and turned him over to the FBI for questioning. The Bureau quickly determined that Martin’s information was false and that Ferrie had not been to Dallas in six years.²³ Martin turned out to be totally unreliable, a drunk who had spent time both in prison and mental institutions. According to Hubie Badeaux, who was acquainted with Martin, he had a local reputation for “crazy and wild stories.”²⁴ On November 26, two days after his original call, he admitted to the FBI that the entire story was a “figment of his imagination.” He had fabricated the tale about Ferrie and Oswald when he heard a radio report that Oswald had been in the Civil Air Patrol in the mid-1950s, an organization to which Ferrie had belonged.²⁵ It turned out Ferrie and Martin knew each other well. They had not only worked together in the past but were the only two members of their own radical offshoot of the Catholic church. Martin acknowledged he was drunk when he made the first call to the district attorney’s office, and confessed that his motivation was revenge for Ferrie’s having excluded him from several recent cases.

Although there was no evidence that connected Ferrie and Oswald, Garrison was certain the “FBI blew the investigation … only I didn’t know it at the time.”²⁶ Garrison became suspicious of a trip Ferrie had taken with two younger friends—from New Orleans to Houston and Galveston—leaving Friday night, November 22, 1963. “It wasn’t even Dave’s idea to go to Houston,” says Alvin Beauboeuf, one of the two teenagers who accompanied him to Texas. “It was my idea. I used to competitively roller-skate for years, and I had never ice-skated. So I told Dave, ‘You are from Ohio, you ice-skate, and I would like to go.’ And it was just like Dave to say, ‘Let’s go.’”²⁷ (Since the ice rink in Baton Rouge had closed, the one in Houston was the nearest to New Orleans).

To Garrison, however, the trip to the Winterland Ice Skating Rink was highly suspicious. Breck Wall, the Dallas head of AGVA who spoke to Ruby on the night of Saturday, November 23, was in Galveston performing in a show. Ferrie, Beauboeuf, and the second teen, Melvin Coffey, had stopped in Galveston. Although they did not know each other, the fact that Ferrie and Wall had been in the same city was too much of a coincidence to the DA.28 Garrison also claimed Eva Grant, Ruby’s sister, had been in Houston on Saturday when Ferrie arrived. She was not.²⁹

There was more. Since Ferrie did not ice-skate with his friends but may have made some telephone calls from a pay phone, Garrison believed that the trip to the rink was obviously a cover, and the rink was actually the message center for the conspiracy.³⁰ He insisted that Ferrie, a licensed pilot, was waiting for a message that would allow him to spirit one or more of the assassins out of the country. The FBI later checked Ferrie’s plane and found it was not airworthy.³¹

The second lead that revived Garrison’s interest in the assassination was a story told by Dean Andrews, a three-hundred-pound, forty-four-year-old jive-talking attorney with a reputation for exaggeration and showmanship. After the assassination, he told the FBI that he recognized Oswald from the newspaper photos as a person he had done legal work for (supposedly trying to overturn Oswald’s undesirable Marine Corps discharge) during the summer of 1963. “Oswald came into the office accompanied by some gay kids … a maximum of five times, counting [the] initial visit,” Andrews told the Warren Commission.³² He never identified any of the people he said had accompanied Oswald to his office, nor did he have any records substantiating the consultations, because, he said, his office had been rifled and the papers were missing.³³*

But Andrews had even more interesting things to say about Oswald—and indeed others. He claimed that on November 23, the day after the assassination, a man called “Clay Bertrand” telephoned him while Andrews was in the hospital recovering from pneumonia Bertrand allegedly asked if he would defend Oswald for killing the President. Andrews, who had a reputation as an ambulance-chaser, had a ramshackle office near the New Orleans port. Much of his work was immigration cases for the city’s poorest clients, and he could not explain why anyone would want him to represent the accused assassin. He described Bertrand as “the one who calls in behalf of gay kids normally, either to obtain bond or parole for them. I would assume he was the one that originally sent Oswald and the gay kids, these Mexicanos, to the office …34 He could not provide any more information about Bertrand, had no files on him, and no means of contacting him. “He is mostly a voice on the phone.… Oh, I ran up on that rat about six weeks ago and he spooked, ran in the street. I would have beat him with a chain if I had caught him.… I probably will never find him again.”³⁵ To the FBI, Andrews had described Bertrand as six feet one, with brown hair. He told the Warren Commission that Bertrand was five feet eight, with sandy hair, blue eyes, a ruddy complexion, weighing 165 pounds, and said he was “bisexual. What they call a swinging cat.”³⁶ Asked about the height and hair discrepancy, he shrugged and said, “I don’t play Boy Scout and measure them.”

The problem was there was no Clay Bertrand. In April, five months after the assassination, the FBI had confronted Andrews with the fact it had combed New Orleans and failed to find anyone who had ever heard of the name. He then confessed his entire Bertrand-Oswald story was fictitious. Yet when he appeared before the Warren Commission three months later, in July, he revived the original tale. When pushed by Commission counsel Wesley Liebeler about the existence of a Bertrand and the call asking him to defend Oswald, Andrews again backed off, saying, “I would tell that I was smoking weed. You know, sailing out on cloud nine.… Yes, I would just say I have a pretty vivid imagination and let’s just forget it.… I was full of dope …”³⁷ When Liebeler asked him if he would lie under oath, he snapped, “Be my guest. I’ll swear to anything.”*

“People did not take Dean Andrews seriously,” says Milton Brener, an assistant district attorney. “He talked like a Damon Runyon character, only more pronounced. He enjoyed saying the most outrageous things, and while he was entertaining, he had little regard for fact.”³⁸ Garrison, however, not only believed that Andrews was truthful but also that Bertrand was a key to the assassination puzzle. In October 1966, Garrison began calling Andrews, as well as some of Ferrie’s friends, into the office for discussions. Andrews further embellished his story. He now remembered the name of Oswald’s Mexican associate—Manuel Garcia Gonzales. There was no such person. Later, when Andrews admitted it was a hoax, he said he told Garrison the first name that came to his mind because “I don’t know what he’s up to. He’s pickin’ me like chicken, shuckin’ me like corn, stewin’ me like an oyster … I’m trying to see if this cat’s kosher, you know?”³⁹ Garrison, who did not even know if there was such a person as Gonzales, eventually became convinced that he was one of the assassins in Dealey Plaza.

In late November 1966, Garrison shocked the rest of his staff when he announced that he had decided that Clay Bertrand was actually Clay Shaw, a prominent civic figure and the man who had almost single-handedly led the historic restoration of the French Quarter. Shaw, the former president of the prestigious International Trade Mart, was an active member of the city’s social elite as well as a poet and a playwright. He was also, in his personal life, a homosexual. Garrison knew he was gay, and that provided a link to Ferrie, also homosexual. One of Garrison’s assistants pointed out that Shaw was six feet four and had shocking-white hair, while Andrews had described Bertrand as five feet eight and with sandy hair. That was a false description to protect his client, retorted Garrison. Moreover, he said, “they [homosexuals] always change their last names, but never their first names.”40

Shaw was brought in for questioning in late December 1966, and it was evident he did not know anything. Garrison was disappointed and told his investigators to “forget Shaw.”⁴¹ Also in December 1966, Garrison told newsmen, “for background,” that he had a suspect [Ferrie] in the Kennedy assassination and an arrest was imminent.⁴² Life magazine quietly assigned several journalists to the story. In January 1967, Life’s Richard Billings asked Garrison if he had unmasked the mysterious Clay Bertrand, and the district attorney told him, “His real name is Clay Shaw, but I don’t think he’s too important.”⁴³

In early 1967, Garrison’s office had to file public papers to explain why it needed additional funds. Reporters for the New Orleans States-Item obtained the papers, which listed the office’s investigation into the Kennedy case. The States-Item broke the story on February 17.* Within a day, reporters from more than thirty countries descended on the district attorney’s office. The buffs also flocked to New Orleans. To them, Garrison was a godsend. He could break the case, since he had the power of subpoena, not to mention a courtroom that protected him from libel for anything he said. Mark Lane, who billed himself as the “unpaid chief investigator for the DA,” advised Garrison on the evidence and had complete access to the district attorney’s files; with William Turner, of Ramparts, he compiled information for an “official history” of the case.⁴⁴ Edward Jay Epstein and Jones Harris, a New York buff, also had access to all the files, as well as to Ferrie’s belongings.⁴⁵ Perm Jones, with Allan Chapman, who believed a worldwide conspiracy of intellectuals controlled the television networks, reported on developments in Texas. Harold Weisberg pored over the Warren Commission volumes, while Raymond Marcus and Richard Sprague concentrated on the films and photographs taken at Dealey Plaza (the Zapruder film was not yet available). Vincent Salandria, Richard Popkin, and comedian Mort Sahl gave general advice. William Gurvich, Garrison’s chief investigator, later said, “His true investigative staff … [when] I was with him were not the police officers, but the authors of the books that are critical of the Warren Report.”46 Garrison dubbed himself “the wagon boss of the buffs.”⁴⁷*

Once the investigation was public, Garrison began to put more pressure on Ferrie, calling in more of his associates for questioning. When he learned that Ferrie had known ex-FBI agent Guy Banister (who died of a heart attack in 1964), he extended the probe toward Banister and the anti-Castro Cubans. So far, Garrison had found only one person willing to testify. He was David Lewis, a shipping clerk who claimed to have seen Oswald, Ferrie, Banister, and anti-Castro activist Carlos Quiroga at a meeting in New Orleans. The only problem was that Lewis was adamant it was in early 1962, when Oswald either was in Russia or had just returned to Texas.⁴⁸ But Garrison was so desperate to build a case against Ferrie that he tried to intimidate and cajole witnesses to provide the necessary testimony.

“I was offered a bribe from his office, by Lynn Loisel [an investigator on the DA’s staff], in front of a witness and on tape,” says Al Beauboeuf, who had accompanied Ferrie on the ice-skating trip on the weekend of the assassination and knew firsthand that Garrison’s sinister interpretation was unwarranted. “And I took a lie detector test and passed it. But they wanted me to change my testimony. You could tell that Garrison had a theory but had no evidence to back it up.”49

On the transcript of the taped conversation, Loisel assured Beauboeuf’s attorney, “The boss is in a position to put him [Beauboeuf] in a job, you know, possibly of his choosing, of Al’s choosing. Also they would be, we would make a hero out of him instead of a villain, you understand. Everything would be to your satisfaction. We can change the story around, you know, enough to positively, beyond a shadow of a doubt, you know, eliminate him into any type of conspiracy, or what have you.… I would venture to say, well you know, I’m fairly certain, we could put $3,000 just like that [snaps his fingers], you know. I’m sure we’d help him financially.”⁵⁰

Loisel laid out the conspiracy plot he wanted Beauboeuf to support. He discussed “cross fire” and escape routes, and said either Ferrie and Shaw, or Oswald and Shaw, were arguing in the apartment, and Beauboeuf overheard them. “But anyway, that’s what we have in mind—along that line,” said Loisel.⁵¹

“It was very obvious,” says Beauboeuf, “they just wanted me to come forward and they would tell me what to say. I told them no way, and when they heard we had recorded Loisel, they went nuts. Louis Ivon [another Garrison staff investigator] came to my house and put a gun down my throat and threatened to kill me because I had exposed them.… They also had pictures they threatened to give out like they were going out of style if I came out in the open … that I might make headlines as Fer-rie’s lover.

“Garrison tried to bribe a lot of people, but I was the only one who had proof. He wouldn’t let up. He was unbelievable. Finally, I made a deal with him to sign a statement that it was all blown out of nowhere, just in order to get him off my back. Then he left me alone.”⁵²*

Early in February, Garrison was introduced to Gordon Novel, an anti-eavesdropping expert he wanted to use to ensure his office was not bugged by the FBI. He soon discovered that Novel knew Ferrie and claimed to have knowledge of his antiCastro connections. Garrison decided to use Novel as a witness, and called him repeatedly to the DA’s office. In a meeting with Novel, Garrison suggested that Ferrie was stonewalling the investigation by lying, and that one solution might be for Novel to shoot Ferrie with a tranquilizer dart and then inject him with sodium pentothal to obtain the details of the assassination plot.53 At one point, Novel also saw apparent forgeries of letters, purportedly from Oswald to Ferrie, in the district attorney’s office.⁵⁴

On February 21, Novel, appalled by Garrison’s tactics, left for Ohio, where he had once lived.* The investigation received a greater jolt the next day, when David Ferrie was found dead in his apartment. Garrison announced it was a suicide, interpreting a rancorous letter to a friend as a suicide note.† The autopsy revealed something quite different—he had died of a berry aneurysm, the bursting of a blood vessel in the skull (forensic pathologists again confirmed the results in 1992).⁵⁵ The coroner was unequivocal that the death was natural, primarily because Ferrie had a history of high blood pressure and a berry aneurysm cannot be induced. But Ferrie was under tremendous strain from Garrison’s probe, and he looked so bad in the days before his death that his acquaintances believed the pressure was too much for him. “When I saw Ferrie two days before he died,” recalls Carlos Bringuier, the Cuban storeowner who had the street confrontation with Oswald during the summer of 1963, “he looked real sick. He told me, ‘I feel very sick. I should be in bed. My physician told me to stay in bed. I have a big headache. Garrison is trying to frame me.’ 56 Al Beauboeuf says, “Dave lost his self-respect, lost his dignity, with those charges. Garrison had set up a camera across the street from his apartment, and they followed him everywhere. They kept pressure on him all the time. They just brought him down to the point where they killed him.”⁵⁷

But Garrison used Ferrie’s death as evidence he was on the right track. Ignoring the coroner’s report, he said, “[Ferrie] knew we had the goods on him and he couldn’t take the pressure.… A decision had been made earlier today to arrest Fer-rie. Apparently, we waited too long.”⁵⁸ There had been no plans to arrest Ferrie.

“Garrison was looking anywhere for a lead; he seemed desperate at times,” recalls Bringuier. “He called me in several times, and he and I were playing a game of chess. I knew any minute he could turn against me. I was trying to avoid a confrontation with him, because I knew he would stop at nothing to make his case. People like Garrison and his staff could be very dangerous. I was warned to be very careful, that I could be killed by them.

“He called in Quiroga [Bringuier’s friend] and left him alone in a room, and the Garrison team brought in a rifle with a telescopic sight and left it in the room for an hour or two. They wanted to see if Quiroga was stupid enough to touch it, and then they would have brought the gun and buried it somewhere in a hole and then found it and charged Quiroga with being part of the conspiracy. You cannot imagine what they were willing to do to succeed in their case. I knew Garrison was bribing witnesses and fabricating evidence. If I was sent to jail, I had decided to go on a hunger strike. I had not come to America and worked fifteen hours a day to allow Garrison to destroy my life and ruin everything I worked for.

“When I spoke to him, that’s when I realized what a crazy investigation it was. And I let him know what I thought. And he said, ‘Maybe somebody is fooling you,’ and I said, ‘Maybe somebody is fooling me, or maybe somebody is fooling you, but we will see who is the fool.’ And he got mad with me, and asked if I would take a lie detector test. And I said, ‘Yes, I’ll take it right now.’ They took me next door and they gave me a couple-hour test, a real fishing expedition. When I left the office that day, it was 1967, and I had read the book 1984, and I thought it was just like 1984.”59

With Ferrie’s death, some of Garrison’s staff urged him to abandon the investigation. But he refused. Instead, he focused on Dean Andrews’s story about Clay Bertrand, although he only had his personal hunch that Clay Shaw was Clay Bertrand. He was not bothered that one of his best assistant district attorneys, Andrew “Moo” Sciambra—like the FBI—had talked to every informant in the French Quarter and found no one who had ever heard the name Clay Bertrand.⁶⁰

On February 24, only two days after Ferrie died, a pack of reporters stopped Garrison as he left a luncheon and asked if he was close to solving the assassination. “My staff and I solved the case weeks ago,” he boasted. “I wouldn’t say this if I didn’t have evidence beyond the shadow of a doubt. We know the key individuals, the cities involved and how it was done. There were several plots, but that’s more than I wanted to say. Ferrie might not be the last suicide in the case. The only way they are going to get away from us is to kill themselves.” A few minutes earlier he told another group of reporters, “The key to the whole case is through the looking glass. Black is white and white is black. I don’t want to be cryptic, but that’s the way it is.”⁶¹

On Wednesday, March 1, 1967, Garrison arrested Clay Shaw and charged him with being part of a conspiracy to kill President Kennedy. Only two days after Shaw’s arrest, Garrison agreed to meet Jim Phelan, of The Saturday Evening Post, in Las Vegas, at the Sands Hotel. He liked an earlier article Phelan had written about his Bourbon Street cleanup and had decided to give him the exclusive story behind Shaw’s arrest.

In Vegas, Phelan said, the man he encountered “was a Garrison I had never seen before, arrogant, prejudicial, blindly confident that whatever he suspected had happened, had to have happened.… [He] told me that some of his assistants had opposed the arrest of Shaw, that he ordered it as ‘a command decision,’ and that ‘this is not the first time I’ve charged a person before I’ve made the case.’”⁶²

Phelan asked Garrison what the motivation was behind the conspiracy. “They had the same motive as Loeb and Leopold when they murdered Bobbie Franks in Chicago back in the twenties,” he replied. “It was a homosexual thrill-killing, plus the excitement of getting away with a perfect crime. John Kennedy was everything that Dave Ferrie was not—a successful, handsome, popular, wealthy, virile man. You can just picture the charge Ferrie got out of plotting his death.” When Phelan pressed him, Garrison said: “Look at the people involved. Dave Ferrie, homosexual. Clay Shaw, homosexual. Jack Ruby, homosexual.” Garrison thought he had uncovered Ruby’s gay name—“Pinkie.” “And then there’s Lee Harvey Oswald,” he said. “A switch-hitter who couldn’t satisfy his wife.” If they were all homosexuals, in Garrison’s opinion, it was too much of a coincidence.*

A preliminary hearing for Shaw had been scheduled for Tuesday, March 14. Near the end of his ten-hour series of interviews with Phelan, the district attorney feared the Post article was in jeopardy because Phelan was still skeptical about the weak supporting evidence. Garrison then walked to the dresser in his hotel room and picked up a thick manila envelope. “I’m going to give you something no one knows about but my top people,” he said. “I’ve got a witness who ties this whole case together. He’s my case against Shaw. Here’s the evidence my witness is going to present in the Shaw hearing next week.”⁶³

Garrison’s star witness was a twenty-flve-year-old Baton Rouge insurance salesman, Perry Raymond Russo, who brought himself to the attention of the district attorney by writing a letter to the DA’s office after Ferrie’s death. He had also given a February 24 television interview to WDSU-TV in New Orleans, in which he said he knew Ferrie and that Ferrie did not like Kennedy. As for Oswald, Russo later said, “I never heard of him until the television on the assassination.”64 On February 25, assistant district attorney Andrew Sciambra interviewed Russo. In a 3,500-word memo, Sciambra reported the results to Garrison. Russo again said Ferrie never issued a direct threat against Kennedy. When Sciambra showed Russo photos of Oswald and Shaw, Russo thought he might have seen Shaw twice, once at a gas station and once at the Nashville Street Wharf. As for Oswald, Russo drew a beard on the photo and said it resembled one of Ferrie’s roommates [he confused Oswald with Jim Lewallen, a Ferrie roommate].⁶⁵

Two days later, on February 27, at Garrison’s request, Russo submitted to sodium pentothal at Mercy Hospital in New Orleans. While interrogating Russo, who was in a semiconscious state, Sciambra introduced the name Clay Bertrand for the first time. Russo had never heard the name before. On March 1, Russo was placed under hypnosis by Dr. Esmond Fatter, whom Garrison had hired, though he had no background in using hypnosis to elicit criminal testimony. What Phelan saw in the transcript shocked him. Fatter, in his interrogation of Russo, used a memorandum supplied by Garrison’s office. While Russo was in a trance, it was Fatter who insinuated the idea of a conspiracy and Clay Shaw. At one point, Fatter said, “Picture that television screen again, Perry, and it is a picture of Ferrie’s apartment and there are several people there and there is a white-haired man. Tell me about it.”⁶⁶ What Phelan did not know is that two days before Fatter placed Russo under hypnosis, Garrison had taken Russo to Shaw’s house, where Russo rang the bell and introduced himself as an insurance salesman. Having seen a photo of Shaw on February 25, and having met him in person on February 28, Russo was ready to incorporate him in his dream state at Fatter’s suggestion.

Shortly after introducing the image of Shaw during the hypnotic trance, Fatter said, “Let your mind go completely blank, Perry.… See that television screen again, it is very vivid.… Now notice the picture on the screen. There will be a Bertrand, Ferrie, and Oswald and they are going to discuss a very important matter and there is another man and girl there and they are talking about assassinating somebody. Look at it and describe it to me.”67

Russo had never talked about a plot to kill anyone. He then responded for the first time, “They planned to assassinate President Kennedy.” As the session continued, he elaborated that there would be a cross fire, and gave more details about the meeting he “witnessed.”*

Phelan could not believe that Garrison had provided him with the two documents, the first of which—the Sciambra memorandum of the original meeting with Russo—utterly impeached the credibility of his star witness. Garrison, who had just received the packet from his office, had impulsively given it to Phelan without first reading the material himself. When Phelan returned it, he asked why the plotters would discuss the details of their plan to kill JFK in front of a stranger who could turn them in to the FBI. “Garrison pondered that in silence,” recalled Phelan, “and then shook his head. ‘Say, that’s a good question,’ he said.”⁶⁸

The March 14 preliminary hearing to determine if there was “probable cause” to hold Shaw for trial was held before a three-judge panel. Russo told his newly developed story about being at a party at Ferrie’s apartment, where Oswald, Ferrie, and Shaw discussed the details of an assassination plot. Shaw was brought into the courtroom, and Russo placed his hand over Shaw’s head and identified him as “Clay Bertrand,” the name he said Shaw used at Ferrie’s party.

Garrison also produced a surprise second witness, Vernon Bundy, a black heroin addict, who was in prison for a parole violation. He testified that when he was shooting heroin along the lakefront during 1963, he saw Shaw meet Oswald and give him some money. The first time he ever publicly presented the story was at the preliminary hearing.

The judges took less than half an hour to rule that Shaw should be held for trial on the charge of conspiring to kill the President. However, it was not long before the DA’s witnesses were under attack. On June 19, NBC News aired the devastating results of an investigation into Garrison’s work. The show disclosed the extent to which the district attorney’s office had tried to bribe and intimidate witnesses into giving favorable testimony. Not only did NBC reveal the incident with Al Beauboeuf, but Fred Lemanns, who owned a Turkish bath, said Garrison offered him money to open a new club if he would testify that Shaw had visited the baths with Oswald and had used the name Bertrand. Russo admitted to reporter Walter Sheridan that his testimony against Shaw was a mixture of truth, fantasy, and lies, but he feared that if he changed his testimony, Garrison would charge him with perjury. “The hell with truth,” Russo said. “The hell with justice. You’re asking me to sacrifice myself for Clay Shaw [by telling the truth], and I won’t do it.”69

During the preliminary hearing, Russo had identified two other people as having been at the now infamous Ferrie party—Niles Peterson and Sandra Moffitt. Niles told NBC he was at the party but said no one was there who even resembled Oswald or Shaw. Moffitt denied being there, and said she had never even met Ferrie until 1965.

In addition, NBC had uncovered two fellow inmates of Vernon Bundy, John Cancler and Miguel Torres. Separately, they admitted that Bundy had boasted he was going to give perjured testimony against Shaw because “it’s the only way I can get cut loose [get out of jail].” Torres also disclosed that the DA’s office had offered him a deal if he would testify he had been at sex orgies at Shaw’s house and knew Shaw used the name Bertrand.⁷⁰

Furthermore, NBC revealed that both Russo and Bundy had failed friendly polygraph tests administered by Garrison. Finally, they asked Dean Andrews if Shaw was Clay Bertrand. “Scout’s honor,” he said. “He is not.”

Within several weeks of the NBC show, William Gurvich, Garrison’s chief investigator, resigned and headed for Washington, where he told Robert Kennedy that Garrison’s case was a sham and there was no basis to arrest Shaw. He repeated those convictions on national television and accused Garrison of using methods that were “illegal and unethical.” He said he hoped to testify before a grand jury.⁷¹

Garrison dismissed the NBC investigation as part of a coordinated effort at “thought control.” He said he was not surprised by the program since NBC’s parent company was RCA, “one of the top ten defense contractors,” and they “are desperate because we are in the process of uncovering their hoax.”72 Garrison then launched a public relations offensive, a media blitz that included a Mort Sahl-arranged appearance on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, the longest interview in Playboy’s history, and dozens of radio and television spots. NBC gave him an unprecedented half hour of unedited national airtime to respond to its expose. Buttressed by the buffs, he captivated a public all too willing to believe that JFK had been killed by a complex conspiracy and that one brave prosecutor was fighting the cover-up forces. “‘He must have something,’ people used to say all the time,” former assistant district attorney Milton Brener told the author. “People everywhere thought he just wouldn’t have brought those charges unless he had something. But that’s exactly what he was doing, just pulling the charges out of the thin blue air.”⁷³

Garrison had now gone far beyond the motivation of a “homosexual thrill-killing” to explain the conspiracy, and he regaled audiences with his constantly changing and expanding theories. Depending on which show he was on, he said the assassination “was a Nazi operation, whose sponsors included some of the oil-rich millionaires in Texas,” or at other times it included the Minutemen, the CIA (with Jack Ruby as the operations paymaster), the FBI, White Russians, or anti-Castro Cubans.⁷⁴ Audiences responded positively to his charges of Nazi involvement, and Garrison elaborated on that concept over several months. He developed a standard college speech titled “The Rise of the Fourth Reich, or How to Conceal the Truth About the Assassination.” Garrison warned that America was “in great danger of slowly evolving in to a proto-fascist state” and that “our government is the CIA and Pentagon …”He claimed that Jack Ruby was a self-hating Jew who had smuggled guns with neo-Nazis and that “Oswald would have been more at home with Mein Kampf than Das Kapital. “⁷⁵ Lyndon Johnson, the Warren Commission, and even Robert Kennedy became part of the cover-up, and he accused RFK of making “very positive efforts” to obstruct his investigation. “It is quite apparent to me,” said Garrison, “that for one reason or another, he does not want the truth to be brought out.”76

He also went after those who had abandoned him or tried to expose the investigation. Garrison charged William Gurvich and Tom Bethell, another aide who quit in disgust, with theft of part of his files; John Cancler, the inmate who spoke to NBC, was hit with contempt of court; Gordon Novel, who resisted extradition from Ohio, had burglary charges placed against him; and Walter Sheridan, the reporter behind the NBC investigation, and Richard Townley, who had assisted in its preparation, were accused of attempted bribery of a witness for offering to pay Russo for his expenses to come to California for an interview.⁷⁷*

Garrison filed perjury charges against a number of witnesses who refused to give the testimony he wanted, not only to punish them, but also because, under Louisiana law, if he obtained a conviction they would be barred from testifying at the Shaw trial. He brought perjury indictments against Dean Andrews; Kerry Thornley, Oswald’s Marine buddy who said he had not seen Oswald in New Orleans in 1963; Layton Martens, a young friend of Ferrie’s who said he could not connect Shaw to Ferrie; and David Chandler of Life magazine, originally a Garrison confidant who later became disillusioned.†

When assistant district attorney James Alcock objected that there was no legal ground for the arrests, Garrison retorted: “Don’t be so legalistic.”⁷⁸ Some of those indicted lost their jobs, and others spent thousands of dollars defending themselves on frivolous charges.⁷⁹ The only one convicted was Dean Andrews, for having concocted the fictitious Clay Bertrand. But successfully prosecuting the cases was not Garrison’s concern. Filing the charges—aside from the intimidation it created—enhanced the image that he was fighting a secret network of conspirators pressed into service to disrupt his investigation. He soon added the media, which he had so successfully used, to his hit list. Much of the national press was part of a “CIA-inspired campaign” against him, he said.80 “Anytime you attacked him or criticized him, you were part of the conspiracy to destroy him,” recalls Milton Brener.⁸¹ The late 1960s, with the country in a rebellion against authority and many wary of government duplicity over the war in Vietnam, gave rise to a climate that was receptive to Garrison’s assertions that the greatest government deception of a generation had taken place in the Kennedy assassination.

As he fended off criticism, he also worked at creating a case against Clay Shaw. During the months following Shaw’s arrest, hundreds of would-be witnesses were interviewed by the DA’s staff. Celebrated cases tend to bring forward people who want to be in the limelight, and the Shaw matter was no exception. Some were outright con artists, who wrote Garrison with exceptional tales about Oswald’s CIA connections and how Shaw fit into the plot, and when the DA then sent them air tickets to come to New Orleans, they merely cashed the tickets and were never heard from again.⁸²

Following up on those who did arrive in New Orleans and tell their stories, Garrison sent his investigators across the country to determine which, if any, he could use against Shaw. A man calling himself Julius Caesar appeared, wearing a toga and sandals, and put Oswald, Ferrie, and Shaw together in an elaborate plot that fit Garrison’s scenario. When the press discovered he was an ex-mental patient, Garrison abandoned him.⁸³ Cedric Younger von Rolleston, an itinerant artist, arrived from New York, where he said he had “worshiped” the younger Oswald, who was then a “thirteen-year-old boy,” and that he had met Ruby at the Dallas jail, been cut in on the postassassination plot, and delivered money to Shaw. After Garrison decided Rolleston’s story did not fit into his theory, he refused to talk to him, and even made him pay his own hotel bill. Rolleston told the press he did not know Shaw after all.84 At the time Richard Nagell offered his help—through the mail—he was confined to the psychiatric section of the federal prison in Springfield, Missouri. Nagell claimed his role in an extensive conspiracy was to execute Oswald, on Soviet orders, in order to prevent the assassination. He changed his mind and instead robbed a bank in El Paso, Texas, in September 1963, so that he would be sent to jail and avoid his conspiratorial duties. Garrison sent an investigator, William Martin, to speak to Nagell. When he found Nagell unreliable, Nagell complained that Martin was part of the CIA plot against him.⁸⁵ Garrison later personally met Nagell, who charged that Clay Shaw, Guy Banister, and David Ferrie all manipulated Oswald on behalf of the CIA. Even Garrison found his tale “not easy to digest.”⁸⁶*

“You cannot imagine what a circus it was,” says Carlos Brin-guier. “And as for Garrison, as time passed, he seemed to get wilder in what he said.”⁸⁷ “I knew that the facts meant absolutely nothing to him,” says Milton Brener. “I knew he was determined to get a conviction on Shaw no matter what he had to do to get the evidence. His judgment was absolutely skewed. It was a farce, but a tragic farce. It’s astounding and frightening, but the whole thing was made out of nothing but his imagination.”⁸⁸

Garrison, heavily influenced by the buffs, envisioned a vast conspiracy of which Shaw was only a small part. Before Shaw’s trial, he made statements about numerous issues for which he had no supporting evidence. Nevertheless, many of his pronouncements survived the prosecution of Shaw and became part of the folklore about the assassination. Among others, he gave his stamp of approval to the following stories: former Dallas sheriff Roger Craig’s tale of a getaway car at Dealey Plaza; witnesses were being killed as part of an organized cover-up (the odds that all the deaths were coincidental were 30 trillion to one, he said); Ferrie and Banister both knew Oswald; Ruby and Oswald knew each other and both had worked for the CIA; Oswald’s Fair Play for Cuba work was only a front for American intelligence; there was an imposter Oswald and he was often present in New Orleans; the Mannlicher-Carcano was planted at the Depository about twenty minutes after the assassination; Ruby may have been injected with cancer cells to kill him (scientifically impossible); and a woman who had successfully predicted the assassination was later killed because she knew too much.*

Every time the media seemed to get close to unraveling Garrison’s case as a fraud, he diverted attention by rolling out another conspiracy story. On Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show, he produced, with a flourish, grainy photographs of five men talking to police in Dealey Plaza after the assassination. “Here are the pictures of five of them being arrested.… Several of these men … have been connected by our office with the Central Intelligence Agency,” he said.89 It was a photo of bystanders, none of whom were arrested, and Garrison’s staff had not identified any of them when he appeared on Carson. Another time he startled the press with the announcement that Oswald’s address book contained Ruby’s unlisted phone number. According to Garrison, it was in code in Oswald’s book and he had deciphered it. He mistakenly assumed two Russian Cyrillic letters in Oswald’s book referred to a post-office box, then converted “P.O.” to “W.H.” and scrambled the numbers, 19106, until he had 6901, then subtracted 1300 to get WH1-5601, Ruby’s number. When asked how he came to subtract 1300, he said it was simply the block on Dauphine Street where Clay Shaw lived.⁹⁰ When a reporter challenged him that his formula was completely arbitrary and clearly worked backward to reach Ruby’s number, he angrily said, “Well, that’s a problem for you to think over, because you obviously missed the point.”⁹¹ Garrison later took the number 1147 that appeared in Oswald’s address book, multiplied it by 10, rearranged the numbers, subtracted 1700, and remultiplied. He said it resulted in 522-8874, the CIA’s phone number in New Orleans, although he failed to mention it was listed in the phone book.⁹²*

Perhaps the most outrageous aspect of the sideshow that Garrison conducted with the media—while Clay Shaw was forced to wait for his day in court—was his evolving pronouncements on the number of assassins at Dealey Plaza. When he started his investigation he thought there were only two, one in the Depository and one on the grassy knoll.⁹³ After he spoke to Harold Weisberg, he put a shooter at the Dal-Tex building and cleared Oswald of firing any shots.⁹⁴ To Playboy, he proffered a second “Oswald” at Dealey Plaza, based on his talks with Richard Popkin.95 Garrison added four more assassins in a CBS interview after speaking to Raymond Marcus, who told him that blown-up photos of the trees revealed the men.⁹⁶ Allan Chapman convinced him that another shooter was hidden inside a storm drain. To The New York Times Garrison flatly announced the fatal shot was “fired by a man standing in a sewer manhole.”⁹⁷ Soon, he made the three tramps, as well as Jerry Belknap, the epileptic who had a seizure and was taken away by ambulance only minutes before the shooting, part of the killing team.⁹⁸ Jones Harris convinced him that a pickup truck shown in a photo hid two more assassins.⁹⁹ After Garrison received an anonymous letter saying that Kennedy might have been shot with “frangible” bullets (those that fragment upon impact), he told Playboy “some of the gunmen appear to have used frangible bullets.”¹⁰⁰ Eventually, Garrison placed sixteen assassins at five locations in Dealey Plaza.¹⁰¹*

His preoccupation with conspiracies was not confined to Kennedy’s assassination. “He saw conspiracies everywhere,” recalls Milton Brener. “And there’s a word for that, and it’s called paranoid. I know that word is discredited because it’s overused, but if it ever fit somebody, it fit him.”¹⁰² Since early 1967, Garrison had carried a pistol clipped onto his belt. He once showed James Phelan a bullet from his pistol and said, “That’s a magnum load, and my gun can’t handle it. If I used it, the gun would blow up on me. I can’t figure out who inserted that shell into my gun.” Then he put the shell back into his pistol.¹⁰³ After telling the press that Havana had sent a hired assassin who was stalking him,¹⁰⁴ he hired bodyguards and used a code language when talking about the case over the phone.¹⁰⁵ Gurvich said Garrison wanted “to raid the local FBI office” to uncover “the secret recording room” that he believed monitored all his conversations.¹⁰⁶ Near the start of the Shaw trial, Garrison took a taxi home one night, and threw the money at the driver as he ran into the bushes near his house, crouching there for several minutes and surveying the area before running up to his front door.107

During the long delay leading to Shaw’s trial, Garrison hoped he could find witnesses who would tie the defendant to either Oswald or Ferrie. On January 21, 1969, the trial finally began, nearly two years after Shaw was arrested. Despite his promises of spectacular disclosures, Garrison presented the same basic prosecution he had in the 1967 preliminary hearing. Yet this time the problems in his case were readily apparent. Russo testified again that he had seen Ferrie, Oswald, and Shaw at the party, but said they might not have been planning a conspiracy but instead just “shooting the bull.”¹⁰⁸ Then Dean Andrews took the stand and admitted that Clay Bertrand was an invented character. Trying to prevent his case from falling apart, Garrison introduced the Clinton, Louisiana, witnesses, who said they had seen Shaw driving a car with Oswald and Ferrie sometime in the late summer or early fall of 1963.*

Then he produced a surprise witness, a tense New York accountant, Charles Spiesel. He testified he had attended a party several months before the one Russo described, and Ferrie, Oswald, and Shaw had been there and had openly discussed their plans to kill Kennedy in front of him. Under cross-examination, Spiesel admitted he himself had been the victim of a vast conspiracy for sixteen years, in which the New York police and his own psychiatrist had invaded every part of his existence, interfering with his thought processes as well as his sex life. He claimed that strangers had hypnotized him some fifty or sixty times “against my will,” and because “new police techniques” allowed the conspirators to enter his house disguised as his relatives, he had fingerprinted his daughter when she returned from school to ensure it was she. Garrison had been aware of Spiesel’s past but put him on the stand over his staffs objection.¹⁰⁹

Yet as the case against Shaw collapsed, Garrison increasingly concentrated on what appeared to be a second prosecution, one against the Warren Report and its conclusion of a lone assassin. Although they were not relevant in determining Shaw’s guilt or innocence, he called Marina Oswald, Bethesda pathologist Pierre Finck, and witnesses from Dealey Plaza. He successfully subpoenaed the Zapruder film and showed it ten times to the Shaw jury.* A court had rejected his attempt to have the autopsy X rays and photos released. †

Late in the evening of Saturday, March 1, two years to the day since Shaw’s arrest, the jury retired for deliberations. It returned forty-five minutes later with an acquittal on its first ballot.‡

For Shaw, whose life was devastated by the charges of having conspired to kill the President of the United States, it appeared he was finally free of the district attorney. Yet two days later, Garrison arrested Shaw for perjury, claiming that when Shaw testified he did not know Ferrie or Oswald, he had lied. It took another two years of legal fighting before a federal court, on June 7, 1971, finally issued a permanent injunction against Garrison from prosecuting Shaw, on the grounds that the charges had been brought in bad faith. At the federal court, Garrison once again offered Perry Russo as a witness, but Russo finally refused to repeat the fabrication about the Ferrie party. He later voluntarily approached Shaw’s attorneys and gave them a tape-recorded statement confessing that Garrison’s staff had told him what to say: “It was sort of a script and I was playing my part. I guess I played a too good one, huh?”¹¹⁰ All his earlier testimony about Shaw was a lie. “I never dreamed he [Garrison] only had me,” he said. “I guess I always knew he [Shaw] had nothing to do with anything.” At times Garrison promised Perry “that after Shaw was convicted we’d all be rich,” and other times he “told me about people who had been convicted of perjury and said mine would be worse because a lot of people had been affected by what I said.”111*

Garrison appealed the federal court injunction to the Supreme Court, where he again lost. His response was a nine-page press release again charging that the CIA had murdered JFK, that Oswald had been a mere “scapegoat,” and that the Supreme Court’s decision “puts the final nail in John Kennedy’s coffin.”¹¹² He lost his bid for reelection as district attorney to a young lawyer, Harry Connick, and complained that the FBI and CIA had assisted in his defeat.

Although he never convicted Clay Shaw, he did bankrupt him. Garrison told Playboy he thought the CIA might have paid Shaw’s legal bills, but Shaw actually spent over $200,000, his life savings, on the four years of legal battles. Borrowing money from friends, he had his attorneys file a multimillion-dollar abuse-of-process suit against Garrison and the investigation’s financial backers, Truth and Consequences. But before it got to trial, Shaw died in 1974 of cancer, a broken man.

“At the time Clay Shaw died,” says Cynthia Wegmann, an attorney and the daughter of one of those who defended him, “Louisiana had a quirk in its laws. For the suit to survive the death of the plaintiff, he had to have surviving children or parents. Shaw had no children, and his mother died shortly before he did, so his case was dismissed. Louisiana later changed its law so the estate of the deceased person could continue the suit. Almost everybody familiar with the case is convinced that if Shaw’s suit had continued, it would have succeeded, thereby stopping Garrison from writing anything else about him.”¹¹³

“What he did to Clay Shaw is a travesty of justice,” says Irvin Dymond, Shaw’s chief defense attorney. “It should never have been allowed to happen in this country. The abuse of power from a megalomaniac prosecutor destroyed Shaw’s life. It was one of the low points in the history of our judicial system, and I don’t know how Garrison can hold his head up without shame.”114

“I thought he was slightly nuts to begin with,” recalls Milton Brener, “and then I think he went completely off his rocker in the Kennedy investigation. He was unsettled. You could see the wild look in his eye.”¹¹⁵

But Garrison never abandoned his zealot’s beliefs. Until his death in 1992, he continued beating the media drum that he was right all along and that only the efforts of the military-industrial complex prevented him from succeeding. In 1988, he published On the Trail of the Assassins, in which he regurgitated all of his theories developed in 1966 and 1967, though they were clearly outdated. He spoke about Shaw as though the jury’s acquittal was a mere oversight in an otherwise iron-clad case.

Despite his efforts, and his election as an appellate judge, he could not redeem his reputation. The evidence of his abusive prosecution had hurt the conspiracy movement and ruined him as a credible voice. Garrison died, at the age of seventy, on October 21, 1992. However, he had lived to see director Oliver Stone use more than $50 million of Warner Bros.’ money to rehabilitate his theory and again tarnish the name of an innocent man, Clay Shaw, for yet another generation.

* Garrison later claimed he had only been sick with amoebic dysentery and the Army incorrectly diagnosed him with acute anxiety.

* In 1967, Life magazine reported Garrison had been given three free trips and a $5,000 line of credit at the Sands Hotel, which was partially owned by mob figures, and that a Marcello lieutenant, Mario Marino, signed one of his bills (Blakey, Fatal Hour, p. 54). Marino later took the Fifth Amendment when questioned about it (“The Mob,” Part II, Life, September 8, 1967, pp. 94–95; September 29, 1967, p. 35). After his second term as district attorney, Garrison moved into a lavish home built by Frank Occhipinti, a Marcello business partner. Garrison bought it for a bargain $65,000, and Occhipinti was his neighbor (Warren Rogers, “The Persecution of Clay Shaw,” Look, August 26, 1969, pp. 54, 56). Marcello bagman Vic Carona died of a heart attack while he was visiting Garrison’s house (“The ‘Little Man’ Is Bigger Than Ever,” Life, April 10, 1970, p. 33). In 1971, Garrison was indicted on federal charges of accepting $50,000 in bribes to protect the mob’s gambling interests. Six co-defendants testified against him, and government surveillance tapes exposed him accepting four bribes. He represented himself in the trial, claiming it was a plot to punish him for his JFK investigation, and won an acquittal. The New York Times later reported there might have been bribes of $10,000 and $50,000 to fix the trial’s outcome (September 21, 1973, p. 25). Milton Brener told the author, “Garrison was on the take. The evidence was there, no question about it.” Even after he became an elected judge, Garrison was still occasionally seen having lunch at La Louisiana restaurant with some of Marcello’s brothers (Scheim, Contract on America, p. 50).

* He claimed Oswald’s acquaintances were later part of a group of fifty cross-dressers the police arrested, and that Oswald was usually with a “Mexicano … [with] a butch haircut,” who was wearing “colored silk pongee shirts.” When the Commission asked Andrews for the names of any of Oswald’s associates, he said, “Today their name is Candy; tomorrow it is Butsie; next day it is Mary. You never know what they are. Names are a very improbable method of identification. More sight. like you see a dog. He is black and white. That’s your dog. You know them by sight mostly” (WC Vol. XI, p. 327).

* Much later, Andrews finally admitted that “Clay Bertrand” was a pseudonym he heard at “a fag wedding” and that he invented the hospital phone call to “get on the publicity gravy train and ride it to glory.… I was just huffing and puffing. I let my mouth run away with my brain” (Phelan, Scandals, Scamps, and Scoundrels, p. 161).

* After it became public, a group of wealthy New Orleans residents formed a committee called Truth and Consequences to finance Garrison’s investigation so he would not have to make public requests for funds. Between February 1967 and October 1968, they contributed $77,000 (Warren Rogers, “The Persecution of Clay Shaw,” Look, August 26, 1969, p. 58). Today, the impropriety of private funding of a public prosecutor, with the inherent possibility for improper influence or conflicts of interest, is a violation of the American Bar Association’s ethical rules.

* When Garrison’s investigation ended ignominiously several years later, most of his supporters backed away from him. Some, like Harold Weisberg and Edward Epstein, even condemned him. However, in the beginning, most were convinced Garrison was on the right track. “The case has been solved,” said Popkin (Anson, They’ve Killed the President, p. 111). Weisberg wrote, “He and his staff are dedicated, and sincere and, I am convinced from my own work, right” (Weisberg letter to editor, Playboy, October 18, 1967). Lane boosted both himself and Garrison, saying, “Besides Jim Garrison, I am perhaps the only person in the world who knows the identity of the assassins” (Bob Katz, “Mark Lane Fingers the Dead,” Mother Jones, August, 1979, p. 27). Closer to the trial, Lane predicted, “When it is presented in court it will shake this country as it has never been shaken before” (UPI).

* Beauboeuf signed a statement absolving the district attorney’s office of any misconduct.

* Garrison was so furious with Novel that he filed burglary charges against him for a conspiracy to steal weapons. The governor of Ohio, James Rhodes, agreed to extradite Novel to Louisiana, but Garrison never completed the paperwork within the sixty-day time limit, so the extradition case was dismissed (The New York Times, July 4, 1967). Yet in a subsequent interview with Playboy, Garrison asserted, “The reason we were unable to obtain Novel’s extradition … is that there are powerful forces in Washington who find it imperative to conceal from the American public the truth about the assassination” (Playboy, October 1967, p. 172). In public speeches, Garrison accused LBJ of pressuring Ohio’s officials in the Novel case, and he told Playboy that “there is no doubt that Gordon Novel was a CIA operative.” He was not. Novel filed an unsuccessful $10 million libel suit against Garrison and Playboy.

† Novel, because of the investigative abuses he had witnessed at Garrison’s office, became convinced that the DA’s staff actually typed the angry, unsigned letter, on Ferrie’s typewriter, so it might appear to be a suicide (Interview with Gordon Novel by Sal Panzeca and Robert Wilson, April 16 and 17, 1967).

* Garrison also thought that Ferrie and the other plotters were responsible for several unsolved homosexual murders in New Orleans and intended to charge them for those crimes as well (William Gurvich conference with Edward Wegmann, August 29, 1967, Tape 2, p. 9). Despite the fact that he was married, Garrison himself was the subject of numerous stories in New Orleans about his sexual preference. A prominent New Orleans attorney told the author how Garrison had tried to sexually molest his brother, then thirteen, in 1968 at the New Orleans Athletic Club. Nationally syndicated columnist Jack Anderson wrote about Garrison’s assault of the youngster in a February 1970 column.

* Dr. Fatter later told Jim Phelan that he “certainly would hate to see anyone taken to trial on what Russo had said in a trance” (Letter to author from Phelan, April 6, 1993).

* Garrison was so furious with the exposé by NBC that he told Gurvich he wanted Sheridan “arrested, handcuffed, and beaten and drug [sic] into jail” (Edward Wegmann, Esq., memorandum, June 4, 1968, p. 1).

* In an almost forgotten part of the case, Garrison had also charged another man, Edgar Eugene Bradley, with conspiracy to kill the President. Garrison had received a letter saying Bradley had made inflammatory remarks about JFK. Bradley had lived and worked in North Hollywood, California, since 1962 and had never lived in New Orleans. But when Garrison learned he had been in El Paso, Texas, on the day of the assassination, he issued an arrest warrant. No evidence or witnesses were ever produced at a subsequent extradition hearing, and California governor Ronald Reagan refused to send Bradley to New Orleans.

* Nagell was the subject of a conspiracy book, The Man Who Knew Too Much, written by Richard Russell and published in 1992 by Carroll & Graf. Russell, a researcher on the assassination for nearly two decades, considers Nagell a reliable source despite his history of mental problems and uses his stories to spin a far-flung plot involving the CIA and KGB. Russell, in his 824-page book, never mentions that Nagell had told Garrison that Clay Shaw was part of a plot with Oswald. Nagell also believes that Oswald was placed into a hypnotic trance by David Ferrie and turned into a “Manchurian Candidate” who then carried out the assassination.

* Rose Cheramie, a prostitute and heroin addict, was found lying unconscious on a road near Eunice, Louisiana, on November 20, 1963, and taken to a hospital. As Garrison developed the story, Cheramie had warned the hospital staff that JFK would be killed in Dallas. From the medical records, the House Select Committee discovered that she had been in heroin withdrawal and physical shock when she was checked into the hospital. Dr. Victor Weiss, a treating physician, told investigators that he did not hear her say anything about the assassination until November 25, the day after Ruby killed Oswald (HSCA Vol. X, p. 200).

The only person who later claimed that Cheramie had mentioned the assassination before November 22 was the state trooper, Francis L. Fruge, who brought her to the hospital on November 20. Fruge initially claimed that Cheramie said she was personally going to kill JFK. When he spoke to Cheramie on November 25, Fruge said that she brought in Ruby and Oswald. Fruge later worked with Garrison’s probe and his story of what Cheramie said before the assassination expanded dramatically.

According to Fruge, Cheramie said that she had been a stripper for Jack Ruby, that she knew that Oswald and Ruby were homosexual lovers, and that she had been thrown out of the car by Ruby, who she was working with on a narcotics deal. Cheramie is the one who provided Garrison the supposed gay nickname for Ruby, “Pinkie.” She died on September 4, 1965, when she was again lying on the roadway and was struck by a car. The subsequent investigation revealed it was an accident, although buffs list it as a mystery death. Further inquiry revealed Cheramie had never worked for Ruby, had been confined to mental hospitals in the past, and had a history of providing the FBI and U.S. Customs with elaborate and false stories about narcotics deals (HSCA Vol. X, p. 203). Yet Oliver Stone still opened his movie JFK with the Cheramie story.

* Among his other accusations, Garrison also charged that Shaw had been a CIA operative. Gurvich, Garrison’s investigator, said, “He [Garrison] has nothing to prove, not even concocted evidence, that Shaw was connected with the CIA” (Gurvich conference with Edward Wegmann, August 29, 1967, Tape 3, p. 4). Shaw was questioned about his foreign travels by the CIA’s Domestic Contact Division, the same as thousands of other Americans during that period, but he had no other relationship to the Agency.

* Although the buffs usually encouraged Garrison’s proclivity to widen his conspiracy charges, sometimes they prevented him from making major mistakes. At one point in the investigation, he had a warrant drafted for the arrest of Robert Perrin, who supposedly could testify about Ruby’s gun-smuggling activities to Cuba. The night before he made the arrest notice public, Weisberg proved to him that Perrin had died in 1962.

* See Chapter 7 for a further discussion of the Clinton witnesses.

* The conspiracy critics working with Garrison made copies of the Zapruder film, and bootleg versions soon flooded the “research” community.

† During 1968, attorney general Ramsey Clark, one of the few federal officials who openly criticized Garrison’s investigation and tactics, had convened a panel of forensic pathologists to review the medical evidence to offset Garrison’s complaint that he was not able to obtain the autopsy X rays and photographs. The Clark Panel, as it was known, confirmed the medical conclusions of the Warren Commission, but its findings were largely lost in the coverage of the events in New Orleans.

‡ A juror later said they would have returned in twenty minutes, but several of them had to go to the bathroom.

* Since the film JFK, in which Russo had a small walk-on role, was produced in 1991, he has revived his original tale. However, during an interview with the author, Russo admitted, “I believe that Shaw was innocent. I do not disagree with the jury. I agree with it. The bottom line is that history must recall that Shaw is innocent. If I was on the jury, I would have come to the same conclusion.”