by Joan Mellen
Garrison was in fact perplexed. In 1962 Kohn had praised his office, which had moved so “vigorously against criminal elements.” Only a year earlier, in 1965, Kohn had again praised Garrison’s efforts, allowing himself to be quoted in a supplement to the Sunday Times-Picayune about the achievements of Garrison’s office. He had no way of knowing that Kohn’s current attacks were connected to the investigation he had barely begun.
Only a week after President Kennedy’s death, the MCC had published a pamphlet rich in biographical facts, with a photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald holding a “Mannlicher Carcano rifle” on its cover. It asserted that Oswald had “acted alone”—this before the Warren Commission had even convened. In the late 1970s, New Orleans homicide officer L. J. Delsa and now a former New Orleans police intelligence officer Robert Buras, working for the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), would question Kohn on how he had obtained the photograph of Oswald and all that information so quickly. “This is evidence,” Delsa said.
“We got avenues,” Kohn said.
By the late autumn of 1966, the CIA and the FBI, working in tandem, had already begun to subvert Jim Garrison’s investigation. The strategy, as manifested by Kohn’s attack, was to undermine Jim Garrison’s credibility by accusing him of Mafia connections. HSCA Miami investigator Gaeton Fonzi discovered from his informant Rolando Otero what Jim Garrison could not yet begin to surmise: “The Mafia angle was first injected at the time of Garrison’s investigation when the Agency decided it was a way of shortcircuiting his efforts.”
Plants were placed in Garrison’s office, among them Pershing’s replacement, Raymond L. Beck, a former FBI agent disgraced in a shoplifting incident. Pershing Gervais is “advising Garrison on his investigation,” Beck told Special Agent Regis Kennedy. To FBI night clerk William Walter, Beck confided: he had been asked by the FBI to spy on Jim Garrison. Garrison intends “to expose errors in the Warren Report,” Beck told them.
As Garrison read, he concluded that the man who during the summer of 1963 had distributed leaflets in New Orleans urging “Fair Play for Cuba” was no left-winger at all. Only one of his Marine Corps acquaintances, Kerry Thornley, had thought Oswald was a Marxist, despite his subscription to Pravda.
Oswald, rather, must have been a low-level operative of the Central Intelligence Agency, “sheep-dipped” or disguised as pro-Castro. Garrison had no evidence that Oswald, who had defected to the Soviet Union in 1959, had been participating in CIA Counter Intelligence chief James Angleton’s false defector program. He did pause when he discovered that a file marked “Oswald and the U-2” had been marked “classified.” Oswald’s radar training with U-2s, the fact that his return from the Soviet Union had been funded with State Department money, while he was accompanied by a wife with family connections to the Soviet secret police, did not add up to his being a leftist. Then, within a few months, Oswald had repaid his entire debt, despite straitened circumstances. Oswald’s tax records were “classified,” Garrison was soon told. Refused the 1,200 CIA files among the Warren Commission findings, he kept on.
Garrison focused on a passage in the Commission volumes on Oswald’s “Military and Civilian Occupational Specialities and Education,” and the fact that Oswald had “cross-trained” at Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi. Only special people had “cross-training,” Garrison knew. On February 25, 1959, Oswald had three more answers right than wrong on a Russian examination, overall two more right than wrong. “That’s like saying my dog is really stupid,” Garrison would say. “When we play chess, I can beat him three games out of five.”
Garrison searched New Orleans for traces of Oswald’s five month residence, but the FBI had swept everything clean. On the day after the assassination they had appeared at the New Orleans Public Library and confiscated Oswald’s book-borrowing records. As late as the 1990s, the Bureau was destroying evidence, as agents marched into the Tulane Library special collections and confiscated from the Hale Boggs papers all of Boggs’ notes and Warren Commission evidence. These included telephone records of Jack Ruby, who had called a New Orleans friend of Ruth Paine, with whom Marina Oswald was living at the time of the assassination.
Garrison compared the moral indifference of those who accepted the Warren Report unquestioningly with the residents of Dachau passing the concentration camp and pretending “they didn’t know what that smoke was that was pouring out of the crematorium.”
In the homicide business themselves, Garrison’s staff were dubious that Oswald, with a bolt-action rifle, its telescopic sight loose, and a tree obstructing his vision, could have done the crime alone. It was a conspiracy, they concurred, and Oswald was “in on it.”
Jim Garrison marked the moment when he officially began his investigation with an October 1966 lunch at Broussard’s French Quarter restaurant with that same Cajun jive-talking lawyer Dean Andrews to whom Eugene Davis had sent William Livesay, instructing him to say that “Mr. Bertrand” had sent him. Blinking behind dark glasses, Andrews sat, clearly uncomfortable. In addition to representing small-time criminals, he was also a mob lawyer, “a little like Pershing,” Herman Kohlman, now a Garrison assistant, thought. Andrews had applied to the FBI for employment only to be turned down as “unstable” and a “big talker.” Disdainful, Andrews called FBI agents “feebees,” the same term used by the Secret Service, according to Lee Harvey Oswald’s brother, Robert.
Another of those requiring legal assistance from Andrews had been Lee Oswald, who had turned up at Andrews’ office in the company of some “gay Mexicanos,” Andrews had told the Secret Service. Fearing his citizenship was in jeopardy, Oswald had come to challenge his “undesirable” discharge from the Marines. The men who accompanied Oswald “possibly frequent the Gaslight Bar in the French Quarter,” Andrews told the Warren Commission, referring to that gay redoubt where William Livesay met Hardy Davis to set him up, the same bar where Livesay had killed Perry Tettenburn. Hardy Davis thought Oswald was a member of a “homosexual clique.” Davis, married but in the closet himself, might well have known something about Oswald’s sexual proclivities.
Now Garrison wished to question Andrews about that call he had described to the FBI, the Secret Service and the Warren Commission, and which he received on the day after the assassination. It was a call from the same “Clay Bertrand” Eugene Davis had instructed the young men he sent to Andrews to invoke. Ill with pneumonia, Andrews had informed “Bertrand,” and all his clients, that should they need to speak to him, he could be reached at the Hotel Dieu Hospital. When Bertrand called asking that he go to Dallas to represent Lee Oswald, Andrews was delighted. “We’ll go to Dallas and become famous!” Andrews told his investigator Prentiss Davis. As soon as his secretary Eva Springer arrived, he asked her, “Do we have a file on Lee Oswald?”
On Sunday morning, realizing he was too sick to go anywhere, Andrews had called his friend and fellow attorney Monk Zelden to go to Dallas in his place. During a second call to Zelden, the point became moot. “Don’t worry about it,” Zelden said, “Your client just got shot.”
“We just lost a client,” Andrews told Davis when he visited a while later. That Sunday afternoon, Andrews phoned a television station, and the Secret Service, to report he had seen Oswald on three occasions. Dean Andrews would be interviewed six times by the FBI, and three by the Secret Service. He told FBI agent Donald L. Hughes that “Clay Bertrand” had accompanied Oswald to his office, and Regis Kennedy that Clay Bertrand was “a French Quarter queer.”
By Wednesday, alarmed at this attention, Andrews had telephoned Jim Garrison’s office, where he reached Raymond Comstock. Trying to figure out what Comstock knew, Andrews pretended he was trying to identify “Clay Bertrand.” Comstock picked up the telephone and called Regis Kennedy at the FBI field office (“Big Regis,” as Andrews called him). Kennedy, it turned out, had already enlisted Comstock to search New Orleans for “Bertrand.”
By now, having been enlisted in a cover-up of the Kennedy assassination, th
e Bureau had developed the strategy that Andrews had dreamed up the call from Clay Bertrand. “Big Regis was pushing me pretty hard,” Andrews later remembered, and so he had succumbed. He had been under sedation, he said, the call from Bertrand “a figment of my imagination.” An FBI report reveals that Andrews did not receive any sedation until eight at night that Saturday, hours after Bertrand’s call.
“Write what you want, that I am nuts, I don’t care,” Andrews pleaded. Kennedy did just that. The whole story, Big Regis wrote, was “a figment of his imagination,” no matter that Kennedy had between thirty and forty men combing New Orleans in search of that “figment,” Bertrand. Later, under oath, before Garrison assistant James Alcock, Regis Kennedy would admit the FBI had been searching for “Bertrand” even before Dean Andrews had come forward.
By the time he testified before the Warren Commission, Andrews was terrified. The Commission did not bother to interview Prentiss Davis, Eva Springer or Monk Zelden to corroborate his story. He began to alter his description of Bertrand. The man who was one or two inches over six feet, as Andrews had told the Bureau, was now five foot eight. Bertrand hung out at Cosimo’s, in the Quarter, Andrews said slyly—as good liars always plant a truth among their obfuscations. He had run into Oswald giving out his leaflets, Andrews told Wesley Liebeler, and reminded Oswald that he owed the office twenty-five dollars. “It’s a job,” Oswald had said, “I’m being paid.” So Oswald had signaled to Andrews, as he would to others, that he was no Castro supporter.
“Your friends down the street are trying to find you,” Liebeler told Andrews, referring to the FBI.
“De Brueys?” Andrews asked, alarmed. Big Regis was one thing, but Warren de Brueys, the FBI’s most intelligent, shrewd and trusted agent in New Orleans, although he was not Special Agent in Charge, was quite another. It was de Brueys who had flown to Dallas on November 23rd to write the FBI’s report that would become the voluminous Commission Document 75, dated December 2nd.
At their historic lunch, Jim Garrison thrust a copy of Whitewash under Andrews’ nose. What he wanted, what Andrews would not yield, was the real identity of “Clay Bertrand.” You’re worse than the feebees, Andrews told Garrison. But Garrison persisted, threatening to summon Andrews to the grand jury and charge him with perjury. Andrews begged to speak “off the record.” Garrison refused. According to Garrison, Andrews then grew frantic.
It would mean “a bullet in my head,” he pleaded. Garrison wondered whether Oswald had ever been told that Dean Andrews would be representing him, whether he had reacted to this possibility in one of those unrecorded telephone calls he made from the Dallas jail. It was never intended that Andrews actually represent Oswald, Garrison thought.
Oswald, famously, had requested that Communist party lawyer John Abt represent him, an obvious signal to his intelligence handlers that his Marxist cover remained intact, that he was loyal still, and they could count on his silence, even as something had gone terribly wrong. Whatever Oswald had been told, it could not have been that he would be standing before the press in a Dallas jail accused of having murdered the president of the United States. This crime he categorically denied having committed.
Garrison speculated: in requesting Abt, “Oswald is still playing out his assignment as an undercover intelligence agent for the government,” continuing the “false front scenario created by the covert action dramatists.”
Garrison had enlisted his youngest assistant, a former boxer named Andrew (Moo Moo) Sciambra, in the Kennedy investigation because “Moo Moo doesn’t yet know what can’t be done,” and so might be aggressive. Now Garrison sent Moo Moo to Cosimo’s bar in search of the identity of the elusive “Bertrand.”
CLAY SHAW COSIGNS A LOAN
3
The key to the whole case is through the looking glass. Black is white: white is black. . . .
—Jim Garrison
AMONTH LATER, IN NOVEMBER of 1966, Jim Garrison flew to New York to attend a petroleum conference in the company of oil tycoon Joseph Rault and Louisiana senator Russell Long. His investigation well under way, all week he talked of nothing but the Kennedy assassination as he sought to gain the support of these powerful friends. “He chewed my ear off about the Kennedy assassination,” Long told his daughter as soon as he got off the plane. He had “always thought” a second person was involved, Long immediately told the press, proposing a new investigation to supersede the Warren Commission.
Garrison had fired disloyal Raymond Beck by getting him a job with his friend Willard Robertson, who ran the Volkswagen franchise, replacing Beck with Lou Ivon. Chief assistant Charlie Ward now handled the routine duties of the district attorney’s office as Garrison devoted himself single-mindedly to unraveling the conspiracy that resulted in the assassination. “Nothing else matters but bringing out the truth about what they did to John Kennedy,” he would say, “and not only that, bringing out the truth about what’s happened to this country before it’s too late.” As tragic as the murder was, the consequences for the Republic, in terms of the survival of democratic institutions, were even more catastrophic.
Garrison dubbed the staff working on the Kennedy case “The Smith Group,” after Winston Smith, the beleaguered hero of George Orwell’s 1984. In his first set of code names, John F. Kennedy was “Jack Smith.” Jack Ruby was “Red.” Oswald was “Patsy.” David Ferrie was “Lindbergh.” Fidel Castro was “Lefty Beard.” The Cuban Revolutionary Council, which met at Guy Banister’s office, was the “Land Recovery Company,” the word “company” reflecting its patron, the CIA. Texas oil man H. L. Hunt was “Harry Blue.”
No suspect was eliminated, from anti-Castro Cubans to Cuban Communists. Nor, Life magazine editor Richard Billings would write in the notes he took while observing Jim Garrison’s investigation, “did Garrison ignore the possible implication of right-wing militants, segregationists, or the mob.” Frank Klein was assigned to investigate whether Jack Ruby had ever made contact with the Marcello organization, since he had hired a stripper, “Jada,” wife of one of the Conforto brothers. Garrison put the question to Pershing. “Nothing to it,” Pershing said.
It was David Ferrie, “Lindbergh,” whose Civil Air Patrol attachment Lee Oswald had joined, who was, as he had been in 1963, once more Garrison’s chief suspect. Ferrie was a natural as an aviator. Having been dismissed from a seminary for “emotional instability,” Ferrie had sacrificed a vocation in the priesthood. Shortly thereafter, he was fired from a high school teaching job for “overattachment” to his young male students.
In New Orleans, having become an Eastern Airlines pilot, Ferrie gathered boys around him, showing them pornographic movies and taking nude photographs. He held forth to a crowd of mostly fatherless young men, by whom he was called “Dad,” on subjects from Jesus to rockets, sometimes hypnotizing them. Ferrie himself boasted of only a bachelor’s degree from a fifth-rate college called Baldwin-Wallace in Bera, Ohio, and a bogus Ph.D. from “Phoenix University” in Bari, Italy.
One of the boys, Eric Michael Crouchet, upset by Ferrie’s sexual advances, filed a complaint against him with the police. When Ferrie, in the company of a tough Cuban, tried to persuade Crouchet to drop the charge, he was arrested for extortion. A fifteen-year-old named Al Landry ran away from home and took refuge with Ferrie. His mother sought help from the police. “The reason she raised all this hell was because I wouldn’t screw her,” Ferrie said.
His person was distinctive because he didn’t have a single hair on his body, the result of an onset in 1932 of “alopecia areata”; he was first treated at a clinic in Cleveland. Depressed, lamenting his ugliness, he glued a piece of reddish brown fur onto his head, and, as Aaron Kohn described him, “little swatches of carpet pasted on for eyebrows.” On his wall Ferrie hung the saying, “People are no damn good.” Machine guns sat on the landing of his apartment, which housed a library including Summa Theologica in Latin, War and Peace, and Firearms Investigation, Identification and Evidence. There were a priest’s vestmen
ts and crucifixes; heavy dumbbells joined a microscope and cages of white mice, along with a fragment of a cancer treatise. Ferrie’s ambitions included ordination as a bishop in the Apostolic Orthodox Old Catholic Church of North America. Some aspect of cancer research was another of his interests, although he had no formal training in science. Ignorantly, he talked to his boys about how parasites could enter the sole of the foot and eat away at the brain.
Ferrie had managed to accumulate friends in high places. He had served as a police informant for an officer of dubious ethics named Sanford Krasnoff. According to Ferrie’s closest young friend, Alvin Beaubouef, it was through Dave’s connections that Krasnoff’s friend, Edward Sapir, fresh out of law school, became a very young judge.
Dave had flown Carlos Marcello back to New Orleans after Robert Kennedy had him deported. Prior to that, Ferrie had traveled to Guatemala to arrange a false passport for Marcello; returning to New Orleans, Ferrie had taped this passport to his chest. When Eastern Airlines fired Ferrie because of his police record, redolent of crimes against nature, his attorney had been a Carlos Marcello lawyer, G. Wray Gill. Dave was paying Gill back by working on the Marcello case, which was heard on November 22, 1963.
It was Ferrie’s political affiliations that interested Jim Garrison. Ferrie had flown for the CIA as a contract pilot, taking off from Tampa, the Keys and Venice, Florida, in sabotage missions: he burned sugarcane fields, dropped propaganda leaflets, and infiltrated and exfiltrated anti-Castro activists. His handler was Eladio del Valle, a mob-connected Cuban exile, who was also involved in setting up training camps to wage war against Castro. Del Valle paid Ferrie between $1,000 and $1,500 a mission, missions tracked by Cuban intelligence. Ferrie also flew for South Central Air Lines, a CIA proprietary. Ferrie’s CIA employment has been confirmed by ex-CIA employee Victor Marchetti. By 1959, U.S. Customs had put David Ferrie under twenty-four-hour surveillance.