A Farewell to Justice

by Joan Mellen

  Garrison dressed nattily in three-piece suits and he was not corrupt, rejecting the Napoleonic premise that political office was a form of private property. John McKeithen offered him a bank charter, which would at once have made him rich. Garrison turned him down. “I don’t have time,” he said. That charter was given to a New Orleans insurance man named Marshall Brown, who dabbled in politics and made it as far as the state board of education. Brown went on to sell the charter for $750,000. McKeithen suggested that Garrison open a law office to which business would flow from the governor and the state, and where Garrison could repair once he was no longer district attorney. He rejected that, too. Money meant nothing to him, and his desk drawer invariably included uncashed National Guard paychecks.

  A gambler named Jules Crovetto from St. Bernard Parish (“The Parish”) down river on the east bank of the Mississippi began to pay off a Garrison assistant. On Fridays, he sent five prime porterhouse steaks to Mayor Chep Morrison, along with the requisite cash. He was close to Felix Bonoura, the “chicken man,” owner of Magnolia Broilers, and as much a purveyor of fowl as Carlos Marcello was the “tomato salesman” FBI agent Regis Kennedy dubbed him. Crovetto thought that for insurance, should the police arrest any of his lottery vendors on illegal gambling charges, he had better bribe Garrison as well. Surely Jim Garrison could be bought.

  Chief of detectives Ray Scheuering made the introduction at the Roosevelt Hotel. Soon it became apparent. Jim Garrison did not take bribes. The assistant whom Crovetto was paying off disappeared from the district attorney’s office. Garrison eliminated the corrupting practice of paying bail bondsmen on the installment plan, and offered, to “Special Assistant” Denis Barry’s distress, too much access to Aaron Kohn. “Any file in this office is available for inspection by you,” Garrison told Kohn.

  Soon, led by Denis Barry, the office began the most persistent crackdown of Bourbon Street abuses on record. Bars, which encouraged B-drinking where girls lured unsuspecting tourists into buying expensive bottles of champagne, were padlocked. “B-drinking” meant, literally, “drinking for the bar,” because for every drink a tourist bought, the girl got her cut, usually one-third for each drink, with two-thirds going to the bar.

  A girl persuaded an unsuspecting hayseed into buying expensive bottles of champagne, which, as the evening dwindled, were more often than not a cheap sauterne with club soda. The girl put her swizzle stick—it bore her own particular mark so she could collect later—into her champagne cocktail, which was invariably ginger ale and lemon. Or she would spit her own champagne into a plastic red-frosted “water glass,” half-filled with ice.

  Promising to meet the John out front later, she fled out the back door. Or she might pour a knock-out drop into his drink and escape. The drunk tourist would then be gentled back to his hotel by the police, who sometimes covered for the clubs.

  A (B)ust-out booth was at the back, and there a girl like “Hot Water Sue” might be accomplishing a hot-water enhanced blow job, or a John might be kissing a girl’s breasts only, when the police arrived, for the bartender to press a buzzer and the girl “bust out” of the booth and disappear. A (B)uy-out meant a customer could buy a girl for the entire night for two or three hundred dollars, but this did not include sexual intercourse, only her company, and, as former police officer Robert Buras remembers, “a hand job or head job in the back booth.”

  Many of these bars were now padlocked.

  In the 1960s this district attorney was a unique Louisiana citizen; the word “nigger” never passed his lips. If a relative of someone charged gained Jim Garrison’s ear, the charges more often than not would be reduced. He had, his assistant William Alford says, “a heart of gold.” William Porteous, another assistant, said Garrison would invariably temper justice with mercy. If he had to let someone go, Alford says, he found him a better job elsewhere. Garrison was a prosecutor who opposed the death penalty, and the longer you sat in his office, the better your chances that the prosecutor would recommend no jail time at all.

  The driver in an armed robbery case was serving nine years at Angola, the state penitentiary, while his confederates had pled guilty and received probation. Garrison and the man’s lawyer, Ray McGuire, signed a joint motion for a new trial. When the police sent in a report on the wrong man in another case, Garrison picked up the telephone. “Are you sure this is the man you wanted?” Saving face meant nothing to him.

  The police arrested some actors for public nudity at La Mise En Scène, a French Quarter theatre. Ever a supporter of the first amendment, Garrison disdained obscenity charges. “You have to prosecute them. They broke the law,” John Volz told him. “Well, I don’t believe in that law,” Garrison said. “I don’t want them charged.”

  At crimes against nature, Garrison scoffed. “I’d have to put my whole staff on trial,” he joked. If an act was between consenting adults, he told Alford, “it shouldn’t be a crime.” Then, to underline the point, he broke into a chorus of “On the Road to Mandalay.” For a year he had the office experiment: no one would be charged with a sex crime; you had to find some other charge, or not. He refused to charge a Tulane medical school professor set up on his yacht on Lake Pontchartrain by a cop. “The only crime against nature is a hurricane, a cyclone or an earthquake,” Garrison said.

  To priests involved in sexual misconduct, whether with children or adults, he granted no favors, and the Catholic church became his enemy. He didn’t care. Alford prosecuted these wayward priests, who in the old days enjoyed the privilege of private visits with Judges Tom Brahney and Bernard Bagert: the priest would plead guilty and escape with a small fine and unsupervised probation.

  Garrison punished police officers for the use of excessive force against blacks, another unheard-of action. “We won’t tolerate this,” he said, bringing police officers before the grand jury and earning the enmity of many.

  Yet, in contradiction to all of this, as his chief investigator he hired a disgraced ex-policeman whom he had known in his army days named Pershing Gervais, long known as one of the best safe crackers in New Orleans, and a person with no regard whatsoever for the law. His parents were deaf mutes and he grew up a connoisseur of survival—clever, virulent, and dangerous. Gervais was a heavyset man with broad shoulders, thin lips and a bulbous nose, his prodigious physical strength matching his penchant for violence. His long belly hung over his belt, a cigarette dangled from his lips, and he would disarm you with witticisms, among which were confessions of his own wrong-doing. He was an older man, a quasi-father figure for Jim Garrison, and utterly amoral. John Volz calls Gervais “the devil incarnate.”

  Pershing shook down the bars, collecting tribute from card games at the Gaslight, the Cover, the Spot, and the Music Box. The Canal Street Steam Bath also paid off. He took money to make cases go away, and kept dossiers on everyone he knew. Comstock bit his lip. Gervais is to Garrison as Professor Moriarty was to Sherlock Holmes, he concluded. Raymond Comstock, Robert Buras thought, would have made a far better chief investigator. The day Jim Garrison hired Pershing Gervais the whole town knew: the office would never be entirely honest.

  “Why does everybody holler about my being chief investigator?” Pershing demanded. “If you want to catch a crook, what you do, you get a better crook.” He had been an informant for Aaron Kohn before he took the job with Jim Garrison, and remained so afterward, informing on Garrison to the FBI as well.

  If a lawyer balked, Pershing had a ready reply: “Those who have money, get a nolle prosequi (a refusal to prosecute even if the grand jury produced evidence); those who want justice, get a trial.” His former partner, Sal Marchese, was his bag man, collecting a thousand dollars a week from the lottery owners alone. Confronted by one of the officers attached to Garrison’s office, Pershing faced him down. “I didn’t know Marchese was collecting that much,” Pershing smirked. For three years, behind Jim Garrison’s back, Gervais went on fixing cases.

  Only the clubs that gave Pershing payoffs escaped the Bo
urbon Street crackdown, not those with connections to mob boss Carlos Marcello. Marcello associate Frank Caracci’s 500 Club, Old French Opera House and Third Sister Hideaway were all hit. Carlo Montalbano escaped prosecution because he had been instrumental in helping Jim Garrison get elected by offering evidence that he had been shaken down by Richard Dowling’s staff.

  Everyone feared Pershing Gervais as he ruled over Garrison’s police investigators. On his desk sat an electric chair skull cap, said to have been used in the electrocution of five men at Angola. He brought a mynah bird with him into the office, and it sang the “Star-Spangled Banner” in a voice sharp and clear, “Sonny Boy” in the voice of Al Jolson, and a tune appropriate to his residence at Tulane and Broad: “The old red flannel drawers/That Maggie wore/She hung them on the line . . .” Pershing taught “Mr. Bird” to irritate those he didn’t trust, those, like Lou Ivon, whose loyalty was to Jim Garrison and not to him. When one day Ivon hung an elegant sport coat on a rack close to Mr. Bird’s cage, the mynah flew over to express his disapproval. Ivon was irate:

  “Fuck you, Louie!” Mr. Bird said.

  With his cynicism (“a man that don’t take money can’t be trusted”), Pershing seemed the opposite of idealistic Jim Garrison. Yet Garrison found him streetwise, humorous, bawdy, and intelligent and kept him on. Denis Barry balked, but Garrison argued that Pershing had testified voluntarily in federal court about graft being paid to the police. You had to know the streets to catch criminals. Lou Ivon thought it was just like Garrison to give someone like Pershing a break, and compared his hiring to Garrison’s helping lawyers even when their licenses were suspended, paying them to do “research.”

  Gervais, a character even Damon Runyon could not have invented, who bragged to Comstock, “I lead Garrison around by the nose,” amused him, and the assistants as well. One day Pershing stood at an open window during a lightning storm: “If there’s a God, let him strike me dead!” he cried. The chief psychiatrist at Tulane University, Robert Heath, had talked about experimenting with electrode implants to give people orgiastic pleasure. “I could get a girl from the French Quarter to do that without an implant,” Pershing laughed. At Norma Wallace’s high-toned whorehouse, Pershing was said to have sold his formidable favors for as much as $1500.

  “Without him, I would be a square on Bourbon Street,” Garrison said, believing he could control Pershing. He couldn’t. His weakness for Pershing Gervais pointed to another aspect of Jim Garrison’s temperament, that aloofness that led to a profound naïveté about people, rendering him vulnerable to deception. It takes him “a long time to recognize the real character and purposes of people,” assistant D’alton Williams confided to Aaron Kohn. In his novel The Star-Spangled Contract, in an implied final word on the subject of Pershing, Garrison rejects the fallacy of viewing people as all black or all white. His villain, Quillier, talks about a “fundamental American flaw, a failure to entertain ironies, contradictions, complications. You want it all apple-pie easy—the good guys and the bad guys.”

  Of all Pershing’s scams the ugliest was his framing of a bail bondsman named Hardy Davis, who was corrupt, but no more so than many. Pershing had learned Davis had gossiped about his son, who had been arrested on a narcotics violation, and he vowed to get even. Among Pershing’s many French Quarter informants was a tough, hot-tempered ex-Marine amateur heavyweight boxer named William Livesay. His forearms were as big as Popeye’s, his hands huge and beefy, his violence reflexive.

  Livesay was a waiter at The Court of Two Sisters restaurant, and shared with Pershing a girlfriend who was a stripper at the Circus Club. He knew Hardy Davis, who had helped him on a knifing charge. On that matter, Livesay had consulted Eugene Davis (no relation to Hardy), the night manager. Young men busted for charges and in trouble with the law turned often for help to Eugene Davis.

  When Livesay asked Eugene Davis for the name of a lawyer, Davis suggested “Dean Andrews,” a local jive-talking, roly-poly lawyer who took his clients where he found them, and who would figure profoundly in Jim Garrison’s investigation of the murder of President Kennedy. Among Andrews’ clients during the summer of 1963 would be Lee Harvey Oswald.

  “Tell him ‘Mr. Bertrand’ sent you,” Davis said. “Bertrand” was the name you used if you were a young male in trouble in the Quarter, and it was clear to Livesay that Davis was not referring to himself when he used the name “Mr. Bertrand.” It would be a “Clay Bertrand” who would telephone Andrews on the Saturday after President Kennedy was shot, requesting that Andrews go to Dallas to represent Oswald.

  As a favor to Pershing, Livesay lured Hardy Davis, who was homosexual, to the Gaslight Bar, in which Pershing had an interest. Livesay proposed that they talk at an apartment on Dauphine Street.

  The police had drilled peepholes in the bathroom door, and stood poised with a movie camera. A tape recorder whirred quietly under the bed. Just as Livesay had his penis in Davis’ mouth, the police converged.

  “You guys busted in too quick!” Livesay quipped. “What was the hurry? There were about nine inches of my dick (give or take a couple of inches) swabbing his tonsils,” Livesay says.

  This chain of events would result in Livesay’s accidentally killing a man named Perry Tettenburn, whom he feared had been sent to harm him in retaliation by Hardy Davis. Now, while Davis was booked at the First District station on a “crime against nature” charge, Livesay was driven to Tulane and Broad to type a statement. It was a Saturday. As Livesay wrote that Davis had solicited him for sexual purposes, he heard excited voices outside.

  “Quick! Someone hide him! The boss is here! Don’t let him see him!” Jim Garrison had chosen to make one of his Saturday appearances at the office. Even as Jim Garrison did not know in advance of Pershing’s setting up of Davis, he later was compelled to take responsibility for this “Gervais operation,” as Louis Ivon calls it. When Livesay was convicted of murder, Garrison opposed a reduction in his life sentence for what was an involuntary manslaughter case at best. He never prosecuted Hardy Davis on the crime against nature charge. Running for reelection in 1965, Garrison admitted that his investigators had “clearly violated” Davis’ constitutional rights.

  Louisiana corruption seeped. In May of 1965 two assistants, John Shea and Edgar Mouras, who handled the complaint desk, a venue brimming with opportunities for graft, resigned in what the States-Item called a “shakeup.” Another Garrison former army buddy who worked for the office undercover, Max Gonzales, told an FBI informant a case could be dropped for $2,000. A prostitute named Kay Roberts, also an FBI informant, reported she heard that for $10,000 a prostitute would not be prosecuted. A Garrison assistant, Al Oser, a chronic gambler (“he would bet on two roaches running across the floor,” Volz says), borrowed money from a Marcello operative, Nick Christiana. Garrison demoted Oser, but kept him on.

  For Jim Garrison, being district attorney had already lost its shine. “Our situation is not unlike that of a man who is paddling upstream in a leaky boat,” he admitted. “If he stops rowing so as to bail out the water, then he starts slipping downstream. If he stops bailing out the water so as to row, then the boat begins to sink.” Then he enlisted the theme song of the civil rights movement: “We Shall Overcome.”

  Jim Garrison enjoyed the small prerogatives of the office: free dinners at La Louisiane (owner Jimmy Moran gave up sending him the bills that went unpaid) and the elegant suits, bills paid at a snail’s pace, from Terry and Juden’s. None of these was enough to keep him interested in being district attorney of Orleans Parish. Politics, finally, bored him. “Never learned to slap a stranger on the back or pretend to remember a strange face and never will,” he was to admit.

  THE MAFIA, SACRED COWS, THE CUPID DOLL AND A SPY LEFT OUT IN THE COLD

  2

  There is no final answer. There is only an honest striving toward the unattainable.

  —Jim Garrison

  SIX MONTHS AFTER GARRISON read Dwight Macdonald’s Esquire article, a New Orleans bill
board read, “Vote for Jim Garrison.” It specified no particular office. But in the autumn of 1965, just before he began his investigation of the Kennedy assassination, Jim Garrison ran, not for mayor against Victor Schiro as had been rumored, but for reelection as district attorney. His opponent was Malcolm O’Hara, son of William O’Hara, who three years earlier had been one of eight criminal court judges suing Garrison for defamation.

  The issue had been control of the pot of bail bond forfeiture money and fines paid by petty criminals, money Garrison used to finance the Bourbon Street raids. Furious with this interference, Garrison attacked the judges, who had their own hands in the till, and who now insisted that only the police department could investigate crime, whether or not it was doing it.

  That these judges were corrupt could be amply demonstrated. Edward A. Haggerty, later to play a prominent role in Jim Garrison’s Kennedy investigation, was an alcoholic and roustabout, ever in fear of being arrested for gambling and whoremongering. Haggerty was likely to grab a file out of the hand of an assistant district attorney, glance at it, then advise the defense, “Don’t plead. They don’t have shit on you.” Judge Platt was at the racetrack. Judge Cocke had run the corrupt Dowling office. Judge Schulingkamp was an open racist. On one occasion, with the same crime committed under similar circumstances, he gave a black defendant one year and a white man three. “The white man should know better,” Judge Schulingkamp said.